Busting Sod

Every March I try to get outside to bust sod. The weather in March is at its most temperamental—all the seasons can happen in one month—snow, sleet, rain, high winds, sunshine. This Friday it’s supposed to be 70 degrees but snow threatens the week after. Not that the weather isn’t temperamental all year round in Buffalo.

The year I moved here, the snow fall reached 7 ft in 2 days. I complained to my mother who was in Seattle at the time. She said, “The weather is the wonder there and if you don’t start appreciating it, you best move.” Since she’s moved here, I’ve repeated this to her so often, she wishes she never said it.

But she was right.

And from that perspective, March is truly the most wondrous month of all.

So far I’ve only gotten one day to bust sod. I’m planning on building a raised vegetable garden. My pumpkins last year, grew over the fence into my neighbor’s backyard. Vegetation grows in abundance here. This year, I want to plant a Three Sister’s Garden—beans, squash, and corn.

Our backyard is typical for South Buffalo, a long rectangle, sunken in the middle, two chain link fences and ol’ rickety wooden one, and a blacktop driveway leads to a small garage. Dave and my father often sit in the back and reminisce about their South Buffalo boyhoods when they ran the fence line hopping from garage to garage, squirreling their way through the neighborhood. There’s a 35 year age difference between them yet it’s the same reminiscence. I don’t want them to put ideas into my son Sam’s head.

Last week, Sam and I began to bust the sod in the backyard or rather I busted up the sod and he collected worms. Busting sod is simple. I dig into the recently thawed, moist ground with a shovel; unearth the matt of grass along with a hunk of dirt. I shake the dirt from the roots, toss the grass away and then break up the clumps of loam. I plow my fingers through the loose soil and plop the worms into the palm of Sam’s waiting hand. Later we’ll sit in the kitchen and watch the robins peck through the dirt pile for those same worms.

No matter how many times the weather throws a temper tantrum and interrupts the spring, the robins, the return of the geese, the crocuses and pussy-willows a bloom let me know that spring is marching in. That same day we saw the robins bobbing for worms, I caught our neighbors’ daughter Ella on our swing set. Hers is much nicer but the grass is always greener (no matter how busted up) over the chain link fence. It’s not only the pumpkins that know no boundaries. She had twisted the chain on the swing and then let it take her on a spin. Yet another sign of spring.

There is something about doing the same thing every year: Digging that shovel into the sod, breaking up the dirt and running my fingers through the cold ground that seems to break up time itself. Time stops being linear. All these moments—Ella on the swing, Sam and I digging for worms, my father and husband reminiscing—begin to seem as though moments can be magnetized. They attract one another until they clump together—moments from this spring and previous ones and the ones I imagine in the future. I hear those moments clicking together as if every spring was happening at this very moment.

First Ward Parade

The First Ward parade is one of two parades attend—the other being Buffalo’s Pride Parade. And this year for the first time a Pride float was included in a St. Patrick’s Day Parade in NY State. For such a staid community, this is progressive.

The First Ward was the first neighborhood built in Buffalo and it became Irish when the immigrants moved in over 100 years ago.

We usually park near the end of the parade route by The Perry Projects. Aunt Ann and I bundled ourselves and Sam up, then pulled him in his red wagon to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. As you near the parade route, you can see the old rusted Granaries in the distance. They appear as end caps to the street. We met up with Mitch—my uncle’s finance. Danny proposed at the parade last year (see previous blog entry). Whenever I walk along the streets of the First Ward, I’m reminded of the movie Hope and Glory which is about a boy and his friends playing in the rubble of WWII. The juxtaposition of youth against the ruins of war is quite striking.

And so it is at The First Ward. That image of squads of Public Servants marching along the ruins of industry strikes me the same way. Add to it the fierce wind and rain. I can almost hear orchestral music swelling in the background. I watch it stream by me like a private movie screening.

But then someone tossed me a can of Genny beer. The crescendo reached the coda.

I’ve seen so much of continental U.S. from coast to coast and pole to pole—land and city scapes. I’ve felt restored, enlivened and gentrified in those places. But those places want not.

Whenever I’m at one of these kinds of events in Buffalo, the religious word “witness” comes to mind. Why I feel compelled to do this is a bit of conundrum for me. I’ve never understood what the importance of putting eyes or ears to an event could mean especially if I’m sharing it with other eyes and ears. If a tree falls in the forest and everyone in South Buffalo hears it, does it matter if I heard it too. Especially me. I don’t think participation is going to bring South Buffalo back to its former Glory. I don’t even Hope for that.

I’m enchanted with forging on in the rubble. I want to play in it; see my uncles and cousins march in it. I want to bundle my boy in rain gear and roll him up to the front line of it.

I simply want to witness it.

Gram

If nothing is going well, call your grandmother~Italian Proverb

South Buffalo is an enclave of Catholic clans in which aged matriarchs reign. It makes sense since the older the matriarch the wider her family tree and the wider a net she can cast over the branches (add to that a Catholic prolictivity for reproduction). Plus she has longer, stronger associations with those in other clans.

I don't mean that these matriarchs are queen bees, sitting on their stingers, enjoying the honey. S. Buffalo is in America. Most women especially of my grandmother’s generation endured the oppressive economics of men making the money and woman being dependant. Husbands’ bad habits, their withholding or generosity of paychecks determined much—the quality of their hive and the street where it was located. But it wasn’t the men that determined what was truly important to the continuation of the clan—it’s identity.

This is a community that boasts its nationalities (and I use the term nationality rather than race, ethnicity or descent as none of those can be claimed) even if we are so many generations into America that mutt is more the truth. One nationality remains alpha in South Buffalo: Irish. I’m a mutt but my grandmother makes me Irish: my grandmother makes her whole motley clan Irish even her German mother.

Required South Buffalo reading: Angela’s Ashes and Mists of Avalon. As both books outline, men are rogue and woman rule. There are inherent problems with this system as rogue males resent rulers and how possible is it for a ruler to rule a rogue?

Gram is the matriarch of my clan even when my grandfather was alive and he liked it that way. It left him free to bowl, golf, and gamble. No matter how often he knocked about or how long he was gone, he belonged to us. Gram was home making him dinner along with various uncles, aunts, mother, nieces/nephew, sister, brother, children, grandchildren. And there was always an extra pork chop on the kitchen counter in case one of those rogues happened by.

She threatened my grandfather that when she turned 50, he could sit on his rocker but she was going to go. She bought a white Cadillac convertible and a set of golf clubs. She went. But she still cooked pork chops.

Sunset Beach

I was 9 nine years old and he was working at the/Metuchen Ford plant assembly line/Now he just sits on a stool down at the Legion hall/but I can tell what's on his mind~Bruce Springsteen

The last weekend before Labor Day we spent at Sunset Beach. My son and I mooched cottage/beach space from my uncle. I say “mooch”; he says “always welcome”. This time my mom came with us.

As I situated my little family on the beach, my uncle remarked that I was using a bedspread as a blanket with the same disapproval as Martha Stewart might if she saw a table runner being used as a shawl. After a brief discussion with one of his friend (there are always beach buddies) on how Buffalo’s old money refuses to invest in the city, I went for some French fries. As I neared Cabana Sams, I heard Vacation by the GoGos being blasted from an open air bar. The GoGos summoned back to me the summer of ’81 when I high schooled in Oregon and vacationed in Buffalo.


That summer, my other uncle’s ex-girlfriend M took me everywhere with her. We cruised the South town beaches—smoked cigarettes, read trashy magazines, baked in the sun. With my fake ID tucked into a pocket (unused: the fake ID was merely a courtesy back then. Showing it just made everyone uncomfortable with the lie, but you had it just in case). She’d take me to the Pierce Arrow or the like. We drank vodka/teas and danced sometimes with a guy or just with each other. My uncle would show up later and they’d drop me off at Gram’s.

Those summer days on the beach I felt as if I was on the brink of something…it turned out to be just more life, but there was anticipation that I’ve never felt again.

With the flush of youthful memory ripping through me, I suddenly felt old, fat, tired and spent like an emphysema-riddled rabbit chasing a carrot on a stick. That’s the problem with nostalgia: the youth in it seems to mock present circumstances. The years I worked at the tavern (more on that another day), the patrons endlessly engaged in the “remember whens” and the reminiscent musings of Buffalo in its heyday— when Bethlehem Steel ascended. Sometimes I loved it—the time when a friend’s mother told me that my aunt shocked their prom by not wearing taffeta but a pink suit my Nana made (ala Jackie Kennedy), but mostly I wanted to scream at those old guys: “IT’S OVER. All you have is today and you’re wasting it.”

Today on the beach I wasn’t much better than those old guys. The GoGos had plunged me deep into my memory and just to make the whole day disorienting, I heard my name and saw her face—M. There she was again.

Nostalgia is such a trap and it’s pervasive here. The place, the people, and the circumstance— nothing seems to have changed since “remember when”. The remains of the steel plant triggers memory to keep the wheels of nostalgia rolling on. Sometimes it’s like living in a cemetery with a vast, empty, rusted mausoleum to the past. If I had a few drinks with M and avoided any mirrors, maybe the alcohol would have tricked my brain and I could relive.

Instead, I pointed out my son playing on the beach with his grandmother and great uncle and asked her to stop by and say hello. My son may grow up alongside the hull of an industrial past but I can't have him grow up with a mom ghosted by her youth. Forget the steel plant and the GoGos; there are better days to be had along the shores of Lake Erie.

About My Fascination with S.B.

Happiness is Lubbock Texas in my rearview mirror~Mac Davis

No matter what I say about South Buffalo, first and foremost I have stuck to this place beyond what is sane or reasonable. I wasn’t raised here and I’ve lived in other places as an adult. I’m not blinded by this attachment—no one would call me a Buffalo Booster; in fact I’m keenly aware how irrational my attachment is.

My grandmother has told me over and over that there is no better place to live than South Buffalo. She’s right for her. For me—there are much better places to live—much better economically, environmentally, culturally, aesthetically, and much better weather-wise. In fact in Buffalo, there are much better places to live than South. But I haven’t returned again and again like some sort of pig-headed homing pigeon to any of those places.

On the eve of her 25th wedding anniversary, my mother’s best friend Karen told me this about marriage: The man you would fall in love with at 22 is not the same man who you would fall in love with at 35. I’ve been in love at both ages—the relationship that stuck was with the man I fell in love with at 35. And I’m grateful. I’m glad not to be saddled with the man I fell in love with at 22 (nor he with me).

This is how it happened to me in love but not with the place I live.

In a town forged by steel, this place molded me at a young age and that imprint has lasted no matter where else I lived.

As a teenager growing up in Oregon, I imagined that my mother had stolen my brother and me off a ship and onto a small boat to go exploring: the places mom took us were fantastic better than that rusting old ship. Even as mom extended our adventures beyond my childhood, I would remind her: we belong on that ship and eventually we’ll need to go back.

And so we are.