GARLIC AND JACK DANIELS

Yesterday morning out in the garden, under some now-and-then brief slivers of sun that somehow managed to make it through the clouds, I was splitting firewood and stonewalling when, as a break from stonelifting I decided to harvest my slouchy garlic rather than just leave it unattended to hang out on street corners after dark and hero-worship the sullen tomatoes. I remember where that can lead. So in the full confidence of midday monkeylessness I dug the bulbs up, bunched them, tied them together with one of the stalks and laid them atop a high cord of firewood to pick up later when I went in for lunch after splitting some more wood.

But because when I went in for lunch I was pondering the deeper quantum relation of chronorelativity as pertains to the torque factors stemming from the interaction of meteorology and gravitation as manifested in the grain of cherry wood I forgot about the garlic, which maybe explains the slouchiness-- was I being too inattentive? Growing garlic is different from parenting: with parenting you get one long shot; with garlic you can try again next year.

Anyway I went in, had lunch, enjoyed a brief nap and came out again an hour or so later to get back to work, when I found that during my brief respite a solo simian had come and scored just one bulb of garlic from the bunch, without making a mess of the very messable mass, just left them where they lay, had taken the single bulb over to the stone steps and there sat quietly eating just half the cloves, then went away, all without making a sound (more proof that it was an individual)-- which surprised me greatly, since I have a carefully constructed, autopowered multifunctional internal monkey alarm that requires no maintenance and is sensitive to such microsounds as occur with garlic movement. The hairy pirates rarely pull off a successful heist while I am at home.

Whoever it was had eaten about half the cloves, then laid the stalk neatly atop the stairs together with the remnant cloves and fragments, arranged in rather an ikebana fashion, and simply departed, without even trying to get into the vegetable garden itself. This did not add up. This solitariness, this quietness, this relative consideration and artistic neatness did not ring any of the old monkey bells in the Brady tower; rather, this combination of factors seemed to me to indicate that I had had a visit from Littlefoot, that quiet, pensive creature. Maybe he just chewed up a bit of garlic to make a poultice for a sore belly.

I think tomorrow I'll leave some Jack Daniels out there with a garlic bulb.