Empty Garden

“Who lived here?

He must have been a gardener that cared a lot

Who weeded out the tears and grew a good crop

And we are so amazed, we're crippled and we're dazed

A gardener like that one no one can replace”

- “Empty Garden”, Elton John

Growing up, whiffle ball games were perhaps responsible for consuming as much of my time as sleep. Almost nightly from early Spring until the World Series ended, a thin, yellow plastic bat, and an assortment of perforated white balls were all that my friends and I needed to occupy our hours. When the balls broke, we’d use duct tape to secure the cracks. Not only did this give us more efficiency with our whiffle ball allowance, it also gave more velocity to the ball. A well-taped whiffle ball was, both, a pitcher’s secret weapon and a good hitter’s chance at a fence-clearing dinger.

The only thing to watch out for was a late swing, because that would often send a foul ball into my dad’s garden, a rectangular box which, during the seasons that corresponded with whiffle ball, was filled to the brim with towering vines of homegrown tomatoes. Retrieving a foul ball meant carefully stepping through the tangled limbs of plants reaching toward one another, the maze of tomato cages, and the dark, rich soil that was the foundation for the entire botanical masterpiece, a cathedral adorned in lush green and bursts of red orbs. I’d traverse the labyrinth in bare feet, soft and moist underfoot, always careful to not disturb a single vine while going on an Easter egg hunt for the missing ball.

Over the years, whiffle ball games subsided and the backyard became less of a haunt for me, but my dad remained the steadfast seedsman. I soon became the transport for his bounty, as he would ask me to deliver small baskets and bags full of his ripe, red tomatoes to neighbors, church members, and friends. I was surprised at the elation that these drop-offs would elicit. You’d think I’d just handed these folks an envelope stuffed with tens and twenties. There was a lesson waiting to be learned here, something I’d need to experience much later down the road to truly appreciate.

It was around this same time - the mid-80’s - that I saw my first Elton John concert, the Breaking Hearts tour, at the OMNI here in Atlanta. Elton put on quite the show. In his late thirties, he was performing with all the verve and commitment he’d become known for, sans a few of the ornate costume changes. One song noticeably absent from his hit-packed set was “Empty Garden”, a Bernie Taupin collaboration written as a tribute to John Lennon, his dear friend murdered at the beginning of the decade.

Using a garden as metaphor for a life spent tending to artistry, Elton and Bernie crafted a song that managed to hit the sweet spot, a song that memorialized without tipping over into mawkishness. Elton said he found it difficult to perform the song live, because the emotion behind it was too raw for him, so he kept it out of his set from the 80’s right on up to his Vegas residency that ran through the 2010’s. When one mentions Elton’s hits, it an easy one to overlook, but once heard, it’s easy to imagine it standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his best 70’s work. It helps that everyone can appreciate a garden: the promise of growth, the need for a balance between sun and rain, the appreciation of reaping precisely what one sows. It’s an analogy as old as Eden.

My dad continued harvesting some beautiful tomatoes until around his 90th birthday, when it just became too hard for him, and the effort was no longer worth the payoff. I try to imagine what it’s like to grow something for fifty springs, to commit to nurturing something almost nightly for fifty summers, to gift something homegrown for fifty harvest seasons. I try to imagine what it’s like to realize that you can no longer do so, that your body can no longer make the investment.

As I grew older, tomatoes finally fell into favor with me. I was always much happier to deliver them in my younger days than actually eat one. Boil them down for spaghetti sauce or pizza and you were on the right track, but slicing and eating a raw tomato never set well with 17 or 21-year-old versions of me. I don’t know when I finally turned a corner. I imagine Wendy was key in my conversion, as she often has been with appreciation of things that I’d long held aversions toward. But soon, I was making some seriously ambrosial BLTs and burgers adorned with scarlet slices of juicy tomatoes. Dad was more than happy to oblige to ensure we didn’t have to settle for store-bought surrogates.

In adulthood, I found that Wendy and I had friends and neighbors who appreciated us sharing a tomato or two when Dad’s bounty was plentiful. Likewise, we had friends who would grow their own and pass one or two along to us. It soon struck me why those deliveries I’d made as a teen garnered such joyful responses. The act of raising something oneself, and then giving it away was the simplest, yet most profound act of kindness, a sort of sharing of one’s own capacity to nurture something to its finest incarnation and then offer it up to the world. It was no different than the intimacy of shared song, the recitation of a recently written poem. This was artistry as communion. As Guy Clark sang, “there’s nothing a homegrown tomato won’t cure.”

When my sister and I started our rotations of caring for my folks full time in late 2019, I’d watch my mom sit on the sofa, staring out into our backyard, eyes cast on a dormant garden. Her dementia episodes came and went, with her no longer seeing the plot set aside for vegetables in the backyard, but instead envisioning horses that she’d dread the sight of, because with them came physical pain. “Oh no,’ she’d gasp. “The horses are going back to the barn.” She’d wince and moan, as if they were stampeding over her very bones. There was also a little boy she saw - I was never sure if it was an imagined neighbor, a friend from childhood, or some version of me she was seeing. I hated to press her for details, and instead just agreed that he was there, standing in our yard near the garden.

Still, that empty garden nagged at us. Wendy decided that my dad’s soil was too rich, and the opportunity too ripe, to let it sit empty while my parents sat inside missing this source of perennial joy. She purchased some seeds and attempted a garden that we could collectively water and weed during the spring and summer of 2020. With the pandemic keeping everyone close to home, it seemed doubly important to have our eyes cast on something promising, something that could grow, a rose rising from the concrete.

We had mixed results, with some lovely flowers blooming and a few hit-or-miss crops of veggies. However, the prizewinning crop was an okra plant that grew taller than me. I made plenty of batches of breaded okra that summer, and it tasted better than anything the most southern of restaurants could slide onto a platter. Mostly, it was such a joy to see my dad looking out on the garden area he’d built in the 1970’s and enjoying it coming to life again after a few seasons of dormancy.

This year we tried again: okra, carrots, cilantro, cucumbers, and more. Weeds crept in, but we watered faithfully. A big rain washed out a lot of what had been planted just a day or so after Wendy put the seeds in the ground, the carrots now commingled with peppers that had been planted two rows over. Then, on May 3rd, we had the biggest rain of the year, perhaps the most seismic storm in a couple of years. It poured so hard and fast that my dad’s trash cans on the curb slid all the way down the street and settled hundreds of yards away. The same happened to neighbors, and it began to look like everyone’s recycling and trash bins were holding a block party at the bottom of Cartwright Drive. I went out in between storms to retrieve them twice, greeting neighbors who were doing the same. There was something I wanted to tell them, but I didn’t have the words. I didn’t want to speak it into existence. Yet, after the last giant burst of thunderstorms that day, the sky calmed, my dad’s breathing slowed, and he rested with the last of the rain clouds. The garden, once bursting with homegrown tomatoes, gifts that brought so much joy and community, was at long last empty.

“Who lived there?

He must have been a gardener that cared a lot

Who weeded out the tears and grew a good crop

Now we pray for rain, and with every drop that falls

We hear, we hear your name.”