THE LONG SURPRISE

From an unknown depth it rises, the delight it always is when the garlic first comes up, my surprise no doubt as ancient as the life the garlic holds, that just a week ago I planted in broken-up cloves and went on gardening day-to-day here and there, doing the little winter-readying tasks, until one afternoon I glance down at where there had been only earth, where now are small green tongues pushing up to sample anew this ancient reality, to speak of being, take some nourishment, gain some strength that in us is courage, to push further into days toward the wholeness each contains, every rising life a tiny measure of the long surprise.

Crow in cedar
beside open window
diggin' Stan Getz

JAPAN ENVIRONMENTAL EXCHANGE
2010 ECO-CALENDAR NOW OUT

"J.E.E. stands for Japan Environmental Exchange. It is a citizens' non-profit organization dedicated to environmental education. J.E.E. disseminates information on environmental issues and carries out international exchanges between people working for the environment. In addition to publishing our annual Eco-Calendar, J.E.E. also publishes and distributes High Moon's GOMIC, eco-cartoon book series, as well as his book of essays and cartoons about the environment, Picturecology.

We also put out a monthly information sheet, hold Green English classes and discussions, perform an original environmental puppet theater that stars the "Eco-neko".
J.E.E. carries a range of environmentally- friendly goods such as chopstick pouches , organic coffee from East Timor, fair trade handicrafts, and T-shirts and cloth shopping bags with delightful illustrations by High Moon on them. Please consider becoming a member or making a purchase to support our activities!"

SUCCESSFULLY NOT CLEANING THE STOVEPIPE

Managed for a whole nother weekend not to clean the stovepipe: not bad for a guy whose primary weekend mission for approximately the past month has been to clean the stovepipe.

That same steadfastness of purpose kept me from getting a full-time job for almost 20 years after college; it has served me well, and it's something I never learned in school. I feel that steadfastness to be something far more ancient than such contrivances as schools and jobs, and at least as primitive as humanity itself.

It is said that aboriginal man actually labors for subsistence only 1/3 of the time; the rest is spent in whatever manner in that culture is best suited, metaphorically speaking, to not cleaning the stovepipe.

However, it is getting colder, and we will need to use the stove pretty soon, plus there's a three-day weekend coming up, or so the ants in me keep telling the grasshopper in me; this might therefore be the ideal time to really push the envelope regarding not cleaning the stovepipe.

Me and aboriginal humans, we're like this (two fingers twisted together like DNA).

YOU HAVEN'T BEEN LISTENING

When you're talking to yourself and you realize you haven't been listening, then one or both of you has to make an adjustment. Either you have to become more interesting, less of a mealy-mouthed drone and more of a discerning speaker with a spellbinding style that captivates you, or you have to learn how to pay considerate attention and listen intelligently, instead of mind-meandering all over the place while you're trying to make a point.

Conversely, you can maybe stop talking to yourself so much and start talking more to other distinctly individual persons, or you can just shut up for a while and see if you feel like you're really missing anything. Maybe in the meanwhile take some elocution classes, or join a listening-impaired focus group. Or both.

This realization came to me yesterday when I was soloing the usual drive along the Lake and got to speaking out loud on something I was thinking about, when at some point realized I wasn't listening to what I'd been saying (merely polite and distracted responses), like I was some obnoxious chatperson on the train I had to indulge-- and I was doing it all by myselves.

We truly do like solitude, but we can go too far.

THE TORCH OF COOL

During the Inquisition that was my teenage days, now way back there in mythohistory along with Achilles, Thermopylae and all that other stuff I've forgotten about since high school, I remember being puzzled as to why the grownups, then perceived as the nearly dead, were so revolted by my super-slick D.A. haircut with a rattail in front, my cherry-red sweater-vest with the black-gray-and-white-striped border over my knockout black shirt with the gold front panel tucked into my ultracool slim-belted 14-inch-pegged white flannel slacks with rattail comb sticking out of the back pocket, the pantcuffs breaking perfectly on my high-sided ox-blood cordovan ducks with a diamond shine. I couldn't figure out the attitude of the nearly dead, in the microseconds I gave it any thought. But in the fundamental certainty that unites all teenagers I was sure that anyway the old was gone forever and the new was here to stay. This was it. The style was set in stone.

I'd be wearing pegged pants and cordovan ducks and a DA haircut when I was 80, and my kids and their kids would too, all the way to the end of time, because who would ever need more than life requires, which is to be the coolest of the cool for as long as possible? And when at last one light-years-distant day I had miraculously reached the ancient age of fifty, I wouldn't have to manifest the revulsion I saw every day on the faces of the nearly dead of the 1950s toward the hypercool duds of the new era.

But now I've reached that half-century mark that was once so far away, the hair's a bit thin for a DA and rat-tail, even if I had the desire, not to mention the time, the grease and the warped sense of history, to create them; 14-inch pegged pants, I'd have to let them out at the waist and thighs, probably even the ankles; and red sweater vest over black gold-panel shirt, forget it, I haven't got the body for that, let alone an interest in defending garments. What's more, I haven't seen a pair of cordovan ducks in a shoe store for over fifty years now; and anyway, why the hell would I want to look like a 50's teenager in my 60s? And who would know but other sixty-year-olds from Elm Street? Wherever they are now.

Besides, now that I've passed my Achilles-equivalency and had hands-on experience with the Thermopylae factor, and having realized all too clearly that I myself am now one of the nearly dead-- in other words, now that I perceive (as only the nearly dead can) the fingerpoppin' transience of things, especially teenagers and teenage fads, I stop and look at the teenagers grungeing along around me, the females dressed like Crazy Jane with their hair done to look like they've just been saved from drowning, the guys with hair like somebody ran their heads through wet concrete, their bodies layered in torn t-shirts hanging out of these at-the-knees pants you could catch a cow in one leg of that end cuffless above shoes my great grandfather would have thought the ultimate in style and I can't help it: I want to say something dissuasive to these little boys as they slag down the street like the ultimate rag men, I want to say something corrective to these little girls walking by like 14-year-old bag ladies, but what for? Teenagers can't hear, as I remember.

So instead, like King Lear I cry to the darkening sky, 'Whatever happened to sharpness?' To the rains and the winds I shout, 'Where is the cool of yesteryear?' But the weather does not answer, any more than it did for Lear or my father or his father before him, when they too stood stumped on the doorstep and watched the kids go beyond reach reach in some incomprehensible fashion, and it comes to me that each new group, in stepping out thus, flares then in its one bright moment of flaming (or smouldering) youth before growing into age, in its turn bearing the torch of the one true style into eternity; that maybe only great grandfathers in the great beyond can look at what kids wear nowadays and smile, smile at how it has all come round again, just like they always knew it would, to one the true style, the way it is in heaven.

THE GIANT KID

Hurricane #18 (seems they don't give them names anymore, which makes it difficult to talk hurricane history around here: was that the #18 of 1987, 1992 or 2009?) came through last night like a giant kid through a roomful of new toys, some of those toys being my house, garden and general vicinity.

Needless to say, the kid a made a giant mess, though among that mess was a bunch of big fat chestnuts I saw all over the ground this morning while touring the scene in the accompanying downpour.

Another thing I have to thank the big kid for is the fact that the trains weren't running this morning; despite my desperate efforts, there was no way for me to get to my beloved office. Heartbreaker, believe me, to sit home sipping tea and weeping for lack of purpose.

Yesterday afternoon I was out gathering in the last of the pumpkins and the butternut squashes before the big messy kid could get his airy hands on them. Turned out though, that the kid may have been hyper in the whirly way, but was hypo in terms of moving ahead; he didn't get here till about 4 am, when he woke me up with a Niagara of rain, heavily punctuated by an hours-long series of shingle-rattles and downed-branch thumps, heavy objects blowing from wherever throughout the night, e.g., the big snow scoop bumblewending its way along behind the house till it finally reached the toolshed with a closing bang. Came morning and it was clear that the landscape around our our humble home had been one of nature's battlefields.

Tokyo and northward is the battleground now; by tonight there will be atmospheric calm all over the country, though another giant kid might be coming around any day now.

ONE PERSIMMON

Harvests all in, fields a golden-brown stubble spiked with green as the days edge into Autumn, skies a blue only leafless trees can bear, leaves gone earliest from the persimmon trees till just the orange balloons of fruit cluster up there in the blue intensity like amber in turquoise, fruit that stays on the tree for the birds to eat throughout the winter (beautiful on country winter days, with its own blue of sky, are those stark brown trees with their arms full of persimmons in the sun when all else is white or dark on the earth).

But the old country folks still eat persimmons too. Late this afternoon as the day headed toward its close I was walking up the road and passed by an elderly man dressed in brown like the fields and the leaves, both hands full of the gold of the large persimmon he'd picked from his tree; he stood there eating it by the roadside, his mouth full of the same goldenness, savoring that juicy sweetness you lose the taste for if you're jaded by factory sweets, on his face a look of pleasure surpassing any description of happiness, and he was only halfway through! What a sight he was, beside a country road in the sunlight of an Autumn afternoon, lost in ageless joy. Who can have more than that?

THE CHESTNUT THIEF

This year we had a bumper chestnut crop because of the heavy rains, which not only pumped up the tree, but also helpfully kept down the insects that usually spoil many of the chestnuts. In a normal year at least 30% are unusable; this year we had twice the usual crop, but only about 5% insected. Delight comes in infinite forms.

Thus it was that on the first morning of the heavy chestnut fall I gathered a bucketful of the thoroughbred beauties, then two mornings later (workday in between) I came out to do some other gardening work and the ground was covered with sleek brown gems gleaming in the morning sun, where they had bounced out of the spiky burst husks, all that hearty tastefulness and nutrition just lying there to be picked up. I forgot about the other work (a groundful of ready chestnuts is irresistible) and went about just picking up the free good ones, leaving those that were still in their husks, and got another bucketful. I left the ones in the husks because I knew that the Chestnut Thief was coming.

Sure enough, that afternoon I was planting potatoes and heard behind me "Kuri no dorobo kimashita!" ("The Chestnut Thief has arrived!") It was Ms. T, our upmountain neighbor, who lives in Kyoto but has a plot of land here on the mountain that she tends once or twice a week (a lot of tara-no-me there). On her way back home she often stops by our place to pick some wild herbs (we have a lot of fukinoto and mitsuba) and, every year about now, to garner the last of the fallen chestnuts. We chatted as we worked at our tasks for about an hour (she said an inoshishi (wild pig) had uprooted one of her herb beds, looking for earthworms). When she left our place she had a big bag filled with chestnuts to help make up for it.

Speaking of chestnuts, I saw on an organic gardening forum somewhere the question "Can I add chestnut husks to my compost pile?" The answer is yes, but first let the husks dry out enough, then rake them into a pile and burn them, tending the fire to watch out for (and keep out of the way of) any exploding chestnuts; then throw the ashes on the compost pile. If left to decay on their own, the spikes take a couple of years to disintegrate; you don't want to get stabbed by surprise in the meanwhile. Having a chestnut thief helps make the whole process easier.

Then you make one long slit across the 'crown' of a handful of chestnuts, roast them in the oven for a few minutes, take them out and you have a crowd of waraigumi (laughing chestnuts), sitting there all wobbly and laughy, ready to crack open and eat. Kids love the happy creatures.

PINECONING

If you're going pineconing (gathering a lot of pine cones), it's best to be accompanied by three young grandgirls. The grandies are especially handy if you're in your late sixties, when walking along scanning the ground while bending over and straightening up 600 times per hour or so doesn't hold much interest.

I can gather pine cones as well as the next elder guy, though, so I can get the job done when it comes to the crunch, but I'd rather stand and from the vantage of my full height direct the young ones (six hands!) to the best clusters of pinecones. They gather them so well because no one understands and appreciates pinecones like little kids do, new lives who can clearly see the magic in those little woody fireworky things. The little hands gather them up like treasure for no reason at all, so its a double delight to be doing it for a purpose that pleases loving grownups! Look how many I have in my bag! Bottom line though, they don't even need a purpose; they just need pine cones. Alas, I'm only daydreaming; the grandies are up north this time. How they would have loved it!

As it happened, Echo and I were still a bit early for pineconing, though not nearly as early as we were last week; quite a few more of the spiky wights had been brought down by the night wind. We use pinecones, as I've pointed out in previous pine cone excursion posts, as firestarters in our winter woodstove. They're beautiful, practical, functional and best of all, free. No. Best of all they give you an excuse to visit the near-empty beaches along this side of the Lake and walk beneath the old pine trees in the autumn wind.

The few kids from the city who are with their families at the pine beaches this time of year, especially the little girls (they love to gather free stuff and neaten the beach at the same time), who fill bags with pinecones, then at the end of the day as they head for the car to go home with their bags of treasure are told to dump them, because what in the world is a parent going to do with bags full of pinecones in a small apartment in the city?

So it happened that when we got to Omimaiko, the mother lode of pineconing, there was a girl there about 10 years old beneath the pines unhappily emptying her bag of hard-earned pinecones, kneeling on the sand and taking each bit of magic out of her big full bag, looking at it and tossing it over either shoulder or somewhere out in front of her, apparently trying to be mother nature by recreating a natural scattering, all the while talking to herself or perhaps to the pinecones she was having to surrender so unhappily-- she was delighted therefore when grownup Echo approached her with her own pine cone bag and, asking the why of it, said she would take the pinecones home herself, if that was ok.

And so we set to the largely pleasant task. Generally it's only kids - who still have that pure sense of amazement - that gather pinecones, though now and then there's an adult who sets out to gather pinecones for some legitimate, adultifiable reason (usually rooted in amazement, nonetheless). As the adult proceeds at the task, however, he becomes to a surprising extent the kid he used to be, the kid for whom pinecones were the jewels they really are, and worth gathering for that reason alone! How could he ever have forgotten that?

SOBA NOODLES CLASS IN TOKYO

I've been a big a soba (buckwheat noodles) fan ever since I came to Japan, and Echo comes from Shinshu (Nagano Prefecture), one of, if not the, renowned soba sources in Japan. "Shinshu soba" is a magic phrase. When we travel, we're always on the lookout for authentic local soba restaurants. Here is an excellent photographic and explanatory detailing of the soba noodle-making process, "one of the most spectacular cooking skills one can hope to learn in Japan." And with an English-speaking sensei (teacher)!

NON-SEQUEL TO THE MONKEY THAT WASN'T ACTUALLY CHASING THE WOMAN WITH THE DOG STORY

From the archives, October 2002

Passing by O's house on our way to a hike up the mountain, saw the monkey who had chased the woman with the dog, the monkey's presence in the middle of the road now eliciting from O the factual finish of that story I'd heard from E about the pounding on the door one day that turned out to be Mrs. T from upmountain, who had been out walking and had asked permission to cross our land to get to the other road to help a woman walking her dog who was being chased by a monkey. I'd never heard any more of the story, until now here was the very monkey!

It turned out that the monkey liked dogs (which is why it was at that moment hanging around O's dogs) and had in fact simply been trying to be friendly with the dog the woman was walking, the monkey approaching the dog, whose owner drew away, causing the dog to also draw away and the monkey to again approach, more earnestly, a cycle that quickly escalated into what was perceived as fleeing woman with dog being chased by monkey, the fear thus eliciting its cause...

Anyway, here before us now was the very same monkey, a young female apparently not tribally minded, that as we approached at first withdrew into the roadside trees and sat in a tree crotch near the road very quietly and at home as in an easy chair, legs dangling, not feeling at all comical sitting in a tree by the side of the road-- not that it should feel comical of course, it's just that the monkey's complete lack of the comical sense was comical in that circumstance; anthropomorphism has many layers.

Later, on our way back downmountain from our hike, because we came bearing many wild persimmons we were well appreciated by the monkey, who drew close at our approach; while talking again with O we gave the monkey one ripe persimmon, which she took off to her roadside hangout to eat so that we wouldn't get any, and when she was finished rejoined us as we stood there in the road talking: two women, one man and a she-monkey, standing there in a tight-knit and mutually interested group, the monkey on her haunches part of the conversation, insofar as it might pertain to persimmons, looking from human to persimmon to human and SMILING, baring her little baby-human monkey adult dentition at us in what could only be humanly interpreted as the kind of abashed smile one uses when poorly concealing desire in a question, such as "Isn't the persimmon a wonderful fruit?"

But the monkey's eyes remained unchanged while the smile was flashing on and off like a neon sign, and I was plunged thereby to the roots of our own smiles, the monkey now and then stepping aside a moment to look down into the roadside grating just in case there might be something down there more worthwhile than a human conversation, then back to join us again, and I suppose somewhere deep in our depths we all wanted to go over and look down into that grating, see what was down there, but we didn't, we're grownup humans after all, we just talked and smiled at each other now and then, after persimmons of some kind...

BIG WHISPER

The sound of the rain as it falls on the forest around the house at night is like the big whisper of a shoreless ocean, the heartbeat of the sky, a rhythmic symphony wafting through the open window as the water cascades in waves that fall on the reach of the trees. Clearly they are ancient familiars.

I who am new to the big family lie half asleep in the night by the window, washed over by the long sound of the falling water as it whispers old secrets to leaves, rocks, grasses and soft earth, uncountable droplets resolving their long journey from high inside clouds lit up by occasional lightning, that captures in its shock to my darkened eye the whole gigantic affair happening up there, the darker darkness closing then around the vision captured, to take with me on a soul's dream journey through the silvery music that fills the darkness, as I rise into the sky...

PUMPKINS IN THE AIR

Some people get up in the morning and say a prayer or do their stretchy exercises or just go and have breakfast; these days I look out the window to see if the pumpkin is still there.

Not that it's an obsession or anything, get away, its just that I've never grown a pumpkin this far before without a passing simian biting through the stem and loping off, arms full of the apish equivalent of the Hope diamond.

This year though, I planted a couple of pumpkin plants inside my new fence, just to give pumpkinity another try, because when it comes to vegetables I'm willing to perform an identical action a number of times and expect a different result, as per Einstein's definition of insanity, like Albert himself no doubt would have done if he'd had a garden up here, but by the same manic means he at last arrived at his own relativity theory, which, like pumpkins in my garden, was insane for its time.

Unlike Albert, I planted my pumpkins rather late, though still in season, since I'm not that insane, partly thinking: well, hell, some pumpkins might at least distract monkey attention from my onions, which seems to have worked so far. An opportunistic pumpkin that had sprouted from the compost pile grew to quite a size before it was snatched by the beasts well in advance of ripeness. Monkeys are not known for gourmetish discernment.

It being so late in the summer when I planted two baby pumpkin plants I didn't expect much, pumpkinwise. Between them they produced one smallish pumpkin, which even the monkeys haven't bothered, but at some point one of the pumpkin tendrils found the net of the fence, when the whole plant began to climb, and once it had those many square meters of airiness all to itself it soared like a bird, put out big fat round leaves and sunny blossoms, and before too long there was a healthy, happy plumpy pumpkin, dangling way up in the air.

I've never seen an airborne pumpkin before, except briefly when we used throw them at each other when I was a garden-raiding kid, much like the monkeys that are imposing my karmic justice on me now, albeit more severely than I deserve. I have more than repaid my debt to pumpkin society. Full karmic interest should suffice, don't you think, Siva? But to get back to the pumpkin at hand, it seems happy up there, wingless though it is.

And by virtue of altitude it might just get past the monkeys, who, like their habituated human counterparts, do not look for pumpkins in the air.

FETTUCINI BOLOGNESE a la ROBERTO

Now and then, one can use a break from even the finest Japanese cuisine, a fact even truer if one is a Westerner.

To enjoy this particular recipe to its fullest after a day of hard work the way I did, you must go out into the garden on an autumn evening when the light of a half moon or more is sufficient to see, feel among the shadowy pepper plants and find a big fresh green pepper, then on your way back to the house get some fresh basil tips.

When you get inside, chop up the pepper, tear up the basil, then from the fridge get some of the fettucini left over from the large batch you prepared a couple days ago. Also get out the leftover Sauce Bolognese a la Roberto you made on the same day. The sauce should be even better now. Don't forget the parmesan. Saute the pepper in fine olive oil, add the sauce and some hot water over high heat, add the basil and an appropriate quantity of fettucine, tossing as you cook fast to reduce the sauce and thoroughly heat the pasta, then put all on a plate, grate the parmesan on top and eat everything like you were on a hillside in Italy looking out over the Bay of Napoli. Feel free to lick the plate.

Then you look up and you're back to a mountainside Shiga, above a Lake made silver by moonight. Fast, intense and frugal world travel.

OWNING MONDAY

For the next two weeks, because of office vacation scheduling I have to switch my off-day Monday with my usual working day of Tuesday, i.e. I live beneath the weight of an icy phrase I never thought I'd hear again: I have to go to work on Monday.

Which means, among about 700,000 other things (mostly little) that for two unending weeks I don't have my beloved three-day weekend. It means 33% off weekend garden things, sky things, weather things, chill things, loafing things, all in the lovely and always welcome elasticity of time as it stretches out before me on Friday evening, week after week, like little tastes of Eden.

It also means that all day Sunday I have to go to work on Monday, which has been the bane of old weekends throughout my office life, which I must say has been mercifully short, for which I am grateful. But I thought that once I left the five-day work week, it would never come back in any form. Never. Yet there it is, in one of its worst aspects: "I have to go to work on Monday." What a dreaded phrase that has always been for me, I suddenly realize, like something said by an immigration official in a nightmare.

I have had Mondays off for nine years now, which isn't all that long as paradise goes, but new and goodly habits die just as hard as dirty old ones. Thus it was that all day today, over and over again I have been feeling a bit 'off,' then realizing that I have to work tomorrow, and saying to myself in uncomfortable disbelief: "I have to work tomorrow; tomorrow is Monday," just like I did during all those office years, which in retrospect I don't know how I got through, working five days a week is that insane or what, it was for me, a two-day weekend are you out of your mind.

Fortunately it is also in the nature of habits to come right back when you call, so in a couple of weeks I shall revert to a state as close to normal as I can expect in such times as these.

New habits live easy.

MORE EDITING DELIGHTS

I used to work there during my middle ages.

This festival is well-known to the community by mouth-to-mouth advertising.

You can find a kind of grass that helps cats vomit hairballs on the shelf of pet shops.

Have a big heart and a big humberger.

As you take a sip, our beer's focus on the real thing is poured into your mouth.

Please submit your position list earlier than now.

The patients had some problems, such as fogy vision.

Company values are sufficiently penetrated into employees.

It is vitally important for Indonesia to move forward so that it can look back...

Please note that you may not enter the park if you choose not to.

YOU CAN FORGET THAT FOURTH STAR THIS YEAR

Yesterday, after completing my gardening duties for the day I took an hour or so break from my intensive loafing regimen to go look for mukago, one of my favorite free foods of the sansai category, which are usually swelling to silvery abundance right about now on vines of yellowing heart-shaped leaves threading over and through the thick mountain bamboo groves. Last year was the best crop ever.

You can eat mukago raw, but the potato-like nodules are better when fried alone, boiled together with rice, stir-fried with various vegs or cooked elsewise with your choice of otherness-- but their look and general uniqueness make them perfect for some fourth-star-seeking chef to make a cuisinary miracle out of, were he-she to trek up here and ask me where the secret places are.

But said chefs can put their careers on hold for now, mukago-wise, because I went to all my favorite secret mukago harvesting spots and found only a few forlorn pea-sized nodules hanging around solo, in a mood of general mukago disappointment, which can be severe. You just had to be there. Must have been the non-stop rain and mostly dreams of sun that made up this summer.

So to do my part, with thoughts of warm summer suns and generous but perfectly distributed rains next year, I picked the few meagers that were there and scattered them to several places where no mukago are growing, and changed the universe forever.

WHO NEEDS OXYMORONS?

The three-day weekends plus Wednesdays off I've been enjoying since my "retirement" have convinced me (as if I've ever felt any doubt about it) that the three-day workweek is ideal for the various aspects to which life in fact pertains, such as lying back and looking at the clouds, forgetting what day it is, dozing off, picking an apple before or during that task you've set for yourself...

A five-day workweek, in disturbingly stark contrast, leaves only two seemingly half-hour days in which to make work appear to have been worthwhile only as a means of getting you to this gasp of a weekend, but it just isn't enough, it just doesn't work out: by the time you slip at last into the near-realization that you're actually not working, you've got to get back to work! That makes a five-day workweek basically indistinguishable from a seven-day workweek, which is the same as death unless you live to work, which is a big oxymoron, like a former boss of mine.

I think we'd all agree, if we weren't so busy at the moment or late for work or running for a bus or getting a license or something equally mazy, that we all need more time in which to ponder and create methods by which to minimize the noxious need for 'gainful' employment, thereby leaving us free to enjoy what is clearly the most important thing in life: i.e., life itself, in all its measures, not just from here to the office-- which enjoyment is, as I see it, the prod that gets us going to work at all, so that maybe now and then we can do a little living.

Trouble is, it takes about 40 years of jobsurvival to at last get even a taste of that freedom, if you do it like everyone else does, which bureaucracies, corporations and governments simply love everyone to do. And by then, if you do make it, you've lost that youthful glow, and totter into your hard-earned freedom leaning on a cane. I got there quicker by living first and working later.

And on the basis of my experience, I hereby formally propose the universal three-day workweek as the solution to the growing problems of unemployment and less-than fully-lived lives, as well as to those outrageous executive pay packages. Moderate employment for everyone, and a moderate salary, for a small workweek and a large life, fillable with the actually good things.

Think those big oxymorons will ever stop to listen to an apple-eating fellow who spends so much time looking at clouds?

MR. K.

Mr. K., one of the original folk around here, who lives in the village and has a very nice garden a few road curves down below, came ambling down the road the other day on one of his long mountain walks, towel wrapped around his head as always, was just passing the house as I stepped out on the deck to give the Carolina jasmine another brush cut.

In his mid-eighties, Mr. K. is tall and thin, vigorous and kindly, wants a new house but it's just a dream for now (hope I can dream like that if I ever get into my eighties), so for the moment he has a nice house-garden in his mountainside vegetable garden, with rocks, small pines and a classic stone lantern.

He stood in the driveway and we talked and laughed until I finished trimming, then I just leaned on the rail as the sun began to set and we continued on about the past (we moved here 15 years ago!) the kids and where they are now, what they're doing; his cute and perky but long-ago dog, through whom we first met Mr. K. when the kids and I were out walking a dozen years ago or so (he says it's too much for him and his wife to take care of a dog now), his garden, fencing, fertilizers, firewood, vegetables, monkeys, deer, wild pigs, he said he feeds his garden mostly with aburakasu (soy oil meal) plus a little chicken and cow manures, no artificials, and has an electric fence like I'm thinking about getting as part of Plan Z for next year.

He had a long way to get back home before dark, so we said goodbye and he walked off down the road with the cane he doesn't really need.

A few days later he left some vegetables by the door.

SHISO BUD RELISH

What an appetantalizing fragrance fills the house, a fragrance of a cinnamony nature, from a plant that's great for tea and cool drinks among other things.

The scent is a perfume that wafts from the shiso (Perilla frutescens) buds I am plucking from the bushy green and purple shiso plants I harvested early this morning (while the mosquitoes were still awake, but now I had my smoking coil with me). It was a perfect morning for herb harvesting: slightly warm but hazy.

I left a few well-positioned plants in place to go to seed for next year and harvested a couple of generous armfuls of whole plants, the leaves to use in making tea or cool drinks or to tempura just as they are, or to wrap onigiri or (purple leaves) to add color to umeboshi, or to use in making shiso furikake, in which select purple leaves (new, clean, tender) are dried then crumbled and mixed with quality salt for sprinkling on rice and other things throughout the winter; or to do what I was doing, pluck off the tiny buds for boiling briefly in shoyu, mirin, sake and a pinch of sugar to make shiso bud relish, which has to be tasted to be believed, as the plant packs all that dynamic energy of future flavor-savor, fragrance and nourishment into those little seedbuds, which if you time the harvest just right are still green and soft inside the calyxes like tiny jade beads on a green silk string, and the string itself is still tender.

If as you pluck it the stem is tender enough to eat, the whole thing comes off for pickling; if the stem is too tough, the buds just slide off like plantain seeds, leaving an empty stem. All it takes is quite a bit of your time; the plant knows how to give you exactly what you want, if you have the patience to receive it. And if you don't have the patience, you can't have any shiso bud relish this winter; you can't just drive down to the supermarket and get a jar of Acme Shiso Bud Relish, it's not manufacturable, machines just don't get that perceptive or meditative, apart from which they just don't care.

After I sit down, pick up a shiso stalk and begin to pluck the seed stems out from where they grow in the leaf axils, before too long I hear myself whistling an old shakuhachi favorite; even at the subconscious level, plucking shiso buds and later stripping off the seeds does not beget She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, or Great Balls of Fire, it brings up meditative, spiritually quiet music from the ancient seed place in the soul, the place you go to again when you finally taste the shiso relish atop your hot rice later in the winter, and all at once you yourself are summertime.