Pup's Garden

     Al Pacino's character in the movie, "Serpico" told the girl next door to "Love my garden."  When she asked him why, he replied, "If you love a man's garden, you love the man."
     "Pup" is what his children called him; I always called him Grandpa.  He was an Italian immigrant who came to this country as a teenager in the early part of the 1900's.  He knew a time before computers, cell phones, television, radios, telephones, space travel, jet planes, airplanes, refrigerators, and cars.  He went to school for only a few years.  He worked most of his life as a laborer.  He raised seven children.  He was never on welfare.  He helped build the New York subways, toiled in the Pennsylvania steel mills, and worked for the city maintenance crew in Hawthorne, California.
     I was a baby-boomer who grew up in the "golden age" of television, the space program, the "new" math, and the 60's.  As a child, when we would go to visit my Grandparents, many times I would not know what to talk to him about.  After a short period of silence, I'd ask to see his garden.
     He and Grandma lived in a nice house in Hawthorne, California that had a huge front yard and a small backyard.  On one side of the house was Grandpa's vegetable garden, or "Pup's Garden."
     That garden proved to be the bridge between his generation and mine.  It literally gave us common ground on which to stand.  In this garden, he became the teacher and philosopher.  In his broken English, he would show me the plants that he had planted.  I would ask a million time what this plant was, and what that plant was.  He would, ever patiently, point out, "This is garlic, this is onion, this is parsley."  I would ask him why he had a "dead" plant in the garden.  He would laugh and explain to me that it was a grape vine and that right now it was "asleep"  but that in a few months it would be full of green leaves and grapes.  It only looked dead.  I'd tell him that it was a beautiful garden and he would humbly accept my compliment, they would explain the problems he would encounter each season--from bugs to cats to diseases.  Then he would tell me how he would use simple logic and common sense to overcome each obstacle.  After awhile, he would say it was time to go in and have some of Grandma's soup.  Some of the vegetable ingredients came from his garden.
     I think he enjoyed showing me his garden as much as I enjoyed seeing it.  When he would latch the gate to the garden behind us, I felt that I had just experienced something very special.
     Little did Grandpa know how I would follow his teachings, not only in my own garden, but also in my life.  When he passed away, I thought of the grape vines that seemed dead, but still had life within them.  It reassured me to know that things are not always what the seem, and I'm sure that I'd see him again in heaven.
     I always loved my Grandpa's garden, and as they say, "If you love a man's garden, you love the man."