Nobody's Mad

Ed Hume / Gourmet Blend
Leaf lettuce, kale, endive, beet greens, spinach, swiss chard, sorrel, corn salad, radicchio, cress, and mustard depending upon availability.
Expected germination: 7-14 days
Expected harvest: 30-50 days

24 seeds

07/15: Planted 2 per cell in 12 cells.
07/18: No visible change.
07/24: Four to six cells excavated, perhaps by squirrel.
07/24: 10 of 24 (42%) have shoots 1/8″ to 3/4″ tall.
08/01: 12 of 24 (50%) have shoots 3/4″ to 2-1/2″ tall.
08/04: Planted out.
08/07: 2″ to 5″ tall.
08/15: 3″ to 7″ tall.
08/16: Begin leaf harvest.
08/23: 4″ to 9″ tall. Harvesting but thin.
08/30: 1-1/2″ to 6″ tall. Harvesting but thin.

Long pod / Cool weather broad bean
Expected germination: 7-14 days
Expected harvest: 85 days

12 seeds

07/15: Planted 1 per cell in 12 cells.
07/18: Three beans have pushed up enough to become visible at the surface.
07/24: Two cells excavated, perhaps by squirrel.
07/24: 5 of 12 (42%) have shoots 0″ to 3/4″ tall.
08/01: 6 of 12 (50%) have shoots 1/2″ to 2-1/2″ tall.
08/04: Planted out.
08/07: 1-1/2″ to 6″ tall.
08/15: 3-1/2″ to 12″ tall.
08/23: 7″ to 19″ tall.
08/30: 10″ to 25″ tall. In flower.
10/27: Started intermittent harvest. Good addition to soups.

For weeks I have been trying to write about “being yourself.”  It’s a slippery topic.

I once wrote the following: “To write truly, just make sure you are yourself when you sit down to write.”  (And I should have added, “Keep on checking as you go.”)  The trouble is, I have a big struggle with being myself, myself.

The most helpful things are so simple that it’s no fun writing about them: pay attention to the air in your nostrils; tell the truth, or at least, don’t lie; focus your eyes; keep your own counsel; do what’s right so you can sleep; be poised for action; don’t refuse to be “here,” use your imagination to lighten-up parts of your body.

After a while the whole thing sounds crazy, and the truest things sound craziest.  Well, that’s a beginning.

I picture myself at nineteen.  I am the passenger in a shiny Chevrolet driven by the young man I am dating.  We are driving across the industrial belly of Seattle, on our way to a nightclub.

I am tensely pretending to be what I already am– a nice, attractive nineteen-year-old girl– and desperately trying to think of something that a nice, attractive nineteen-year-old girl might say.

My date turns to me with a disconcerted look and says, “Don’t strain, for God’s sake.  Just be yourself.”

I don’t remember what I thought next, but it must have been something like this:

“Oops! Oh no!  What have I done?  He sees though me!  What if he never calls me again?  How can I fix this?”

And, not knowing what else to do, I would have intensified my pretense of being who I already was.

Because I had no idea what it meant to be yourself, not then and not for a long time afterwards.

The feeling of being not-yourself is a smarmy feeling.  You feel ashamed all the time.  The moral judgments are unrelenting.  If you’re kind and nice, you’re on your case immediately: “I’m so insincere, so sugary, so slimy, and so awful– I bet people see right through me.  Why can’t I be spontaneous and sincere like everybody else?”  If you’re bad, as we all are sometimes, then you’re bad, of course:  “The real me has put in an appearance, and  I’m bad to the core,” you think.  There’s no way out between being slimy and inauthentic or rotten through and through.