Life Sketches by Terry Berkson

Garden (and Song) Editing

Several years ago, thanks to a friend who gave us cloves and seedlings, we already had garlic and tomato plants growing in the garden. A few days before, I had driven over to a nursery for some other vegetables. Unfortunately, they were out of cucumbers and I had to make several stops before I finally found a place that still had some.

It wasn’t too late to start from seeds, but I was eager to get the garden going. I also came home with broccoli, potatoes and cucumbers.

Alice was weeding when I got home and she offered to do the planting if I would fetch what she needed.

The broccoli went in okay, as did the potatoes, but before the cucumbers found root my wife dropped a shovel on the pack, crushing some of the seedlings.

“I feel terrible,” she groaned.

“That’s okay,” I said. “We have plenty left.”

As if to prove I was wrong, Alice lifted the plant box with a gloved hand only to have it slip to the ground upside down. I turned the box over. Now, every plant was broken.

“Is it that you don’t like cucumbers?” I asked.

“The gloves made me do it,” she said in a tone reminiscent of Flip Wilson. “I’ll drive to town and get some more.”

“No problem,” I said. “The roots are still in good shape. They’ll just take a little longer to grow.”

“Are you sure?” my wife asked.

“I’m sure,” I said, but I wasn’t.

So, Alice sheepishly buried the remains of the plants I had searched all over town for. All the time I was thinking of how I could erase them from the garden and insert some new seedlings without my wife knowing about it.

As luck would have it, an hour later a friend called to invite Alice to the Stanley Theater in Utica to see Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out.” It seems her husband wasn’t feeling up to attending the show and she wanted someone to accompany her and not waste the ticket.

When my wife left for Utica there was still time to drive to the nursery to buy some more cucumber plants. I returned home and dug out the roots she had just planted, and put the new seedlings in the original row.

I guess my switching the plants and the mention of Billy Joel and the show, “Movin’ Out,” had triggered a long-ago memory involving another kind of deception.

I was working on construction in a high-rise building in lower Manhattan. My partner, “Roidney” Bunion, was 10 years younger than me, an ex-football player and a product of the “tune out and turn on” generation.

One day he came to work so high on Quaaludes he couldn’t drive a nail in the wall in order to hang up his jacket. His whole world seemed to revolve around how and what he could find to get high on.

Imagine my surprise one morning when he comes to work with a song he’s written on the kind of beige paper they used to pack your shirts at the Chinese laundry. I get to read it during coffee break and it’s good! Real good! I think it fits into the category of urban folk.

It’s about this young couple, Brenda and Eddie, who were still going steady in the summer of seventy-five.

“You got talent!” I tell my young partner.

He knows I’m a writer, respects my opinion and gloats through clouded eyes. Also, I’m sure he thinks the 10 years I have on him has put me in the Over The Hill Gang. To him I’m a square.

Nevertheless, I took out a pencil and began to do some editing to smooth out some of the rough ways he expressed himself. He didn’t say anything. I figured he had confidence in my writing skills.

A few days later, Roidney (I got the name from various ailments and injuries he had) came in with this beat up, ragged, scratchy record album, “The Stranger,” by Billy Joel.

Up until then, the only song I could attach to the singer was “Piano Man.”

“Take it home and listen to it,” Roidney tells me.

I reluctantly followed his advice and once I got past all the skips and scratches, I found myself listening to some excellent music and words that I could really relate to, songs like “Vienna,” “She’s Always a Woman” and “Just the Way You Are.”

Then I got to the song with the line about Brenda and Eddie, and I realized Roidney didn’t write it, that he’d been goofing on me pretty much the same way that I was now deceiving my wife about the cucumber plants. I still hadn’t told her about the switch and the next day, when she went out to the garden, she was very pleased that the roots had “sprouted new leaves in such a short time!”

Devil that I am, I was tempted to send her down to the nursery for some subterranean puffball seeds. When I had been an apprentice on construction, a mechanic once sent me to the supply house for a can of steam.

Alice won’t know what I had done with the cucumbers until she reads about it in “The Freeman’s Journal.”

Sometimes when we think we’re in the know, we’re not, and sometimes “when we’re wrong we’re right.” There’s always room to learn something more.

I wasn’t mad when I found out Roidney didn’t write the song. I hope that Alice, “who’s always a woman,” isn’t angry when she finds out what I did with the cucumbers. And as for Billy Joel, he’s been a great success—even without the benefit of my editing.

Terry Berkson’s articles have appeared in “New York” magazine, “Automobile” magazine and many others. His memoir, “Corvette Odyssey,” has received many good reviews: “highly recommended with broad appeal,” says “Library Journal.”