Capers With Carroll

If we can pull away from the California elections, long enough to focus on more important things, the most profound question of the moment is whether my Chinese Dragon Fruit is at its peak of ripeness. I reported September 22nd about the first blossom I've ever had on my several-year-old vine, and about hand pollinating it. I'd read that these fruit ripened at 30 days, but this one didn't start showing color until about five days ago. Now the big question: When will it be at perfection?



Okay, back to my election endorsements.

(P.S., the delectable continuation of this saga can be found here.)

. . . it must be getting close to the end of Daylight Savings (I think we have nine more days).

A quick word from our Sponsor: "My mercies are new every morning."

Some twenty-five years ago in a Bogotá market, I met my first yellow pitayas, a fist-sized fruit with a bumpy rind and delicate white flesh. I rummaged through the pile and found one with enough of its cactus stem attached that I could try rooting it. It grew but never thrived nor blossomed. I brought a cutting from that plant through customs in 1990, but lost it to a freeze. By the time I tried to bring another cutting through customs, the Hylocereus megalanthus was protected as an endangered species and I lost my sample to confiscation.

Eventually a member of the California Rare Fruit Growers offered me cuttings of both the pitaya and its near cousin, the Chinese Dragon Fruit (Hylocereus undatus), but I’ve never had the right place, or the right climate, or the right touch. They grow best in places like Thailand. I’ve waited in vain, watching for my first blossom.

Last night it came. My potted and trellised vine sprawls in a hard-to-reach corner of my sun-porch, but I noticed a tiny bud last week. It grew at a rate of over an inch a day until it reached eleven inches. I lived in fear of missing its brief appearance. The Hylocereus blossom only opens once, for seven or eight hours, in the middle of the night. When I found it open, I was most surprised to see an off-center pistil overlooking a mass of delicate stamens. Its smell was noticeable, though drab, but the flower was stunning. I quick snapped some pictures, brought my wife out for a viewing, and plucked some stamens for hand-pollination.

Now I must wait to see if my efforts will pay off. My reading tells me the Dragon Fruit needs thirty days from blossom to mature fruit. I’m counting.

The picture at left is from a Dragon Fruit I enjoyed in Kunming, China.

I hate to even bring this up, knowing that several of my readers survived Hurricane Hugo. Others helped in the cleanup and rescue after the Indian Ocean tsunami and a handful are veterans of last year’s Sichuan earthquake. However, my county in California has been officially recognized as a disaster area. I would tell you the common name of the disaster, except that leadership of both WHO and US (boy, doesn’t THAT sound like Abbot and Costello) decided the long-standing name was slanderous, and replaced it with a moniker that will never catch on. Fortunately, the virus itself mutates rapidly, raiding DNA from its unwitting hosts. Thus, I’m suggesting we mutate the name of this pandemic and call it the SwH1N1e Flu of 2009.

This morning, I peacefully over-slept, but then hurried around to get the trash can to the curb before leaving for work. During the day, I proctored some tests, corrected some papers, and tried to explain the causes of the American Civil War to several groups of 8th graders. It was eerie.

Eerier yet, the kid we sent home yesterday with fever and a suspicious rash was back in class today, looking healthy.

Some of the 8th graders have gone to mimicking the masks they see in newscasts. They wrap lengths of paper towel around their faces (well, it does help avoid the causes of the American Civil War). They are mostly disappointed that an after-school dance was canceled, but school itself was not.

Coming home, I visited several stores in hopes of buying alcohol-based hand-sanitizer. Finally, I found some symptom of disaster: Hoarders had beaten me to the squirt-bottles of Prell. In the midst of times like this, it is the human kindnesses that stand out: The manager of PetCo remembered that he had a package in the back, designed to fit a wall dispenser they no longer used. He gave it to me for free.

The big question in the press (Google shows it has generated 3,344 news stories) is what Vice President Joe Biden said (or meant to say, or would have said if the lobbyists had properly briefed him) about flying in airplanes during the pandemic. What he seems to have said is that he would advise his family not to. (We were warned, as far back as the convention, that he is sometimes capable of this, or worse.)

Um. Texas is closing down entire big-city school districts.

The difference, however, is that school districts are tax supported while airlines need paying customers. So the spokespersons said first that Biden meant he would tell his family not to fly to Mexico. Later they said Biden meant he would tell his family not to fly if they suspected that they might be carrying the disease, were contagious, and constituted a likely danger to other passengers. (This is also the administration that believes condoms provide an adequate barrier against all the pertinent viruses, so there is precedent.) Personally, I’m glad that—for other reasons—I had already decided not to fly anywhere in the next several months.

But I do plan to keep going to school, until the health department recommends closing it. I will squirt hand-sanitizer on my students and hope we can look back on this official disaster as a fizzle. If that should come to pass, I will take off my hat, admit WHO’s on first, and let them call this virus anything they want.

This sunset is brought to you by a bad Google Map that sent me eight or nine miles past the motel where I had reservations, and out narrow Highway 1. Fog had already hidden the Golden Gate Bridge, and was closing quickly on this scene, to the low moans of fog horns and the whistle of wind in the moss-draped trees behind me. I stood it as long as I could and then hurried back to the car and its heater. Then I drove back in the direction of cell-phone reception. The desk clerk's Urdu flavored English was difficult to decifer, but I caught that the motel could be seen near a Walgreen's. I'm in Marin County doing research (on the inland side of the peninsula) for my novel. (Note to Google: no Walgreen's up this stretch of Highway 1.) Note to self: Thank Google for one serindipitous bad map.

My grandmother (nee Watson) felt a special attachment to the Watsonia, and nurtured a healthy patch of them in her yard. My sister had the foresight to gather some of the corms. She’s moved several times over the last decade, but a colony of those Watsonias moved as she moved. At some point, she passed a couple of starts to me. Rushed for time, I put them into a poorly-chosen patch of ground, not knowing where I might eventually place them. In part, I stuck them in a patch of yellow oxalis (O. pes-caprae) because this was another plant I associated with my grandmother’s yard.

That must have been, what, six or seven years ago? I wish I could say these plants were thriving. (Well, the oxalis is: no matter how pretty it may be, it well-deserves its reputation as an aggressively invasive weed.) Recent research tells me Watsonias like loose, well drained soil that doesn’t completely dry out in the summer. Unfortunately, I have them in heavy soil, beyond where the sprinklers reach in our 110° July. Under the circumstances, I’m thrilled that after all these parched summers, the Watsonia still manages to send up its annual stalk of orange blossoms.

Wikipedia tells me that Watsonias are out of fashion in a nursery industry that wants to fill that niche with its near-relative the gladiola. I suppose the gladiola is showier, with a dramatic spray of bigger flowers. I do enjoy a gladiola when I see one. But the Watsonias carry me back 50 years to my grandmother’s yard.

It is difficult for me to believe that this year will mark the 20th anniversary of my grandmother’s death. It is remarkable how much she is still with us. My brother recently digitized old recordings of her playing ragtime piano. That reminded me that someplace I have several hours of interviews on reel-to-reel that I want to transfer to CD. This week, however, it has been enough to watch the symmetrical rows of orange trumpets catch the sun, and enjoy my grandmother's company as I admire them.

The Westmont College website has photographs of damage from the fire that raced through campus last Thursday evening. Few colleges offer the kind of beauty that Westmont does, nestled in the oak-covered hills of Montecito. I first visited Westmont when my daughter Aileen was a high school student trying to settle on a university. She did not submit a backup application to any other institution.

The downside of that beauty is a vulnerability to the windswept flames that almost yearly burn somewhere in Southern California. This fire approached from the woods north of campus and cut through Clark Residence Halls (a collection of 17 separate buildings: Aileen roomed there 1995-97). It took some parts of Clark and spared others. Then it descended through the center of campus by way of the wooded strips that make Westmont so distinctive. Flames destroyed math and physics buildings that had already been marked for demolition, the psychology building, and over a dozen faculty homes, but no one was hurt.

I last visited the Westmont campus in December. Aileen and Eduardo held their wedding in Santa Barbara and we used Westmont as a backdrop for their wedding photographs. We took most of our pictures in the formal gardens that stretch downhill from Kerrwood Hall.

The gardens mostly survived, though the fire took the woods in the right side of this view. Aileen also wanted pictures outside the small white chapel that is flanked on both sides by oak groves, and then a playful series with Aileen and Eduardo playing peek-a-boo around the trunk of a nearby giant.

The Westmont website pictures show that while the groves on both sides are cinders, the chapel still stands, and the peek-a-boo tree looks scorched, but alive. In fact, that’s a pretty good summary of the 47 photos in the series: Westmont is scorched but alive.