MindSpinner

In the center of the crescent window
whence light falls
the moon is a paring
curled in solitude
on a whisperless sea.

I have the car back again, with a brand new wheel. The bill, while not insignificant, did not seem enough to include a new Toyota wheel, labor, and towing. I called back this morning to check to see whether it was right or whether towing had been left off.

The small town mechanic that took care of my car has been in business a long time. He and his wife used to operate a small service center in a dingy old shop in a low place by the creek that sometimes floods. For decades they have done an honest business, always charged people fairly, never taken advantage. They have a reputation for the very best service. Now they are located in a big, nicely equipped building with a clean front office managed by Mrs. Honest Mechanic, assisted by her mannerly, sleek dachschund, while Honest Mechanic works with nine employees in the big shop, fixing, oh, maybe 20 or 30 cars at a time. They’d done well enough over the years, Mrs. Honest Mechanic told me, that they didn’t have to worry about making a lot money anymore.

I had indeed been charged for the towing and the wheel, it turns out, but I had not been charged for labor - not for an hour, not for a minute, not even for the time and travel required to procure the new, exactly matched Toyota wheel. These good people fixed my car at some expense to themselves. They even came across town and picked me up at my house so that I could retrieve my car. A heartfelt thank you hardly seems enough.

But there is something I’m even happier about than paying a bill that is $50 or $100 cheaper than it could have been, and that is this: it is a relief, a comfort, and a hope to note that it is still possible to succeed in business by offering quality service at a fair price. I’m grateful that Mr. and Mrs. Honest Mechanic grace the planet with their example and that I’m lucky enough to live in the town where they do business.

Today in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes about yet one more less than sage appointment within the Bush administration, Porter Goss’s choice of Kyle Foggo for the CIA’s # 3 position: executive director.

Friedman frames the larger issue:

Is there no job in this administration that is too important to be handed over to a political hack?
No. In his excellent book on the Iraq war, “The Assassins’ Gate,” George Packer tells the story of how some of the State Department’s best Iraq experts were barred from going to Iraq immediately after the invasion — when they were needed most — because that didn’t pass Dick Cheney’s or Don Rumsfeld’s ideology tests. And that is the core of the matter: the Bush team believes in loyalty over expertise. When ideology always trumps reality, loyalty always trumps expertise.

Yes, Mr. Bush has seen the error of his ways and has sacked the Goss crew, but we just wasted a year and saw a number of experienced C.I.A. people quit the agency in disgust….

I understand that loyalty is important, but what good is it to have loyal crew members when the ship is sinking? So they can sing your praises on the way down to the ocean floor? I just don’t understand how a president whose whole legacy depends on getting national security and intelligence right would have tolerated anything but the very best in those areas. What in the world was he thinking?

Friedman leaves us to our answers: whatever thinking George Bush does, it is hardly perspicacious, and it serves ends other than our collective good.

I am interested in another journalistic investigation of some scope, however - the flip side of irresponsible appointments, mentioned above. I’ve heard much about Bush’s appointees, remarkable only for their lack of stellar qualifications, but I’ve read less than I want to know about the talent and expertise we are losing, often permanently, from the service of our country because the Bush crew is in charge. There are people we’ve depended on for years in many capacities, and, if they aren’t pushed out, some number of them are leaving in disgust and disillusionment.

I’m hoping Americans will effect a coup at the ballot box this year and again in 2008, but I’m quietly thinking that when we do - and we had better - we’ll be starting over with an infrastructure depleted of some of its best minds, the ones most likely to speak truth to power and count that the greatest loyalty they can offer. There will be rebuilding to do; a great storm has come through, a flood of foolishness; when it recedes it will leave its damage, its debris, its dead.

Today my three-wheeled car was towed away for repair, leaving the driveway looking as if it has no purpose at all, unless we’d like to take up roller blading. I feel like a bird that’s had her wings clipped, but we haven’t really suffered. A colleague whose daughter I have transported many a time is giving me rides back and forth to school, and the grocery store is just a half mile or so away. I made a grocery run on foot for the first time this morning. Buying in bulk is now out of the question, and as I toiled homeward with four bags of groceries, I looked a little longingly at the wheel barrows for sale across the street at our neighborhood hardware store. At Kroger, I found myself evaluating purchases by weight and not just cost and desirability, and I left my Light Cran-Grape juice on the shelf. It isn’t so light if you have to carry it along with milk and other goodies.

By tomorrow afternoon, I will have a new wheel to replace the damaged one (damaged by what I do not know, other than the hammer wielded at Wal-Mart). The condition of the tire, once re-inflated, remains to be seen. If that’s also shot, we’ll be stuck for another day. That’s fine, too.

This brief no-wheels interlude has made me think a little harder about what life may be like a year or two down the road, when gas may well be $100 or $200 a barrel. The issue won’t be merely whether I have enough money to fill the tank of a Corolla; it will be whether I can afford the rising cost of everything. I’m gradually trying to ready our yard to grow some of our own food in raised beds and in the kitchen garden which is actually just one big raised bed with stone paths curving through it. This year my garden goals are these:

1. Begin growing vegetables in raised beds: squash, corn, beans, and fingerling potatoes.
2. Protect our grape vines, using Super-Light Insect Barrier fabric sold by Gardens Alive, from the voracious Japanese beetles that consumed every leaf last summer.
3. Harvest our first full crop of peaches. Last year the first peaches appeared but were too badly damaged by insects to be edible. I’m bagging the fruit this year to protect it. I’ve stapled on about 25 brown lunch bags so far after cutting them down so that they are almost square. This is slow and painstaking, though I’ve tried it a couple of different ways, because peaches don’t grown on much of a stem. I’m afraid the bags will blow off in the first storm. (A downpour is testing them right now, but there’s no wind.) I’m also going to try Japanese Apple Bags ($7 per 100), and, for the sake of experimentation, I’m going to fashion my own re-usable bags out of the insect barrier fabric I’m buying to protect the grapes. If the insect barrier fabric is strong enough, those bags would be reusable. I like the idea of the fruit getting light and a bit of air. Time will tell which of the three methods works best.
4. Figure out how to preserve certain foods without refrigeration through the winter (After some research today, I’m theorizing that big coolers can be used to serve as root cellars in my unheated garage.)
5. Adjust the backyard landscaping plan to incorporate disease resistant dwarf apple trees. Given the fact that we have deer, I may end up planting these in the dogs’ fenced play yard. I think I can figure out how to protect the trees from the dogs, who will not be intent on eating the apples, and I do believe the deer will stay out.
6. Start composting.

It’s true that we may end up moving at some point, but if we do, there will be some buyer out there who wants the garden I’m creating, and it will be the garden that sells the house, which itself is otherwise interchangeable with many others in this town, right down to the floorplan. As long as I am here, the garden will be a work in progress.

The cat posts himself by the window and requires that the miniblinds be raised at least 6″. When a robin lands on the front lawn or a cottontail nibbles, hopping and pretending to be garden statuary by turns, a creaky meow wells up in him, and he is all aquiver. He can enjoy the outdoors directly only in spring because come the end of May he is afflicted with severe allergies that will make him asthmatic and nauseous. Then, when the door is open, we have to block his attempted escape into the wide, wide world with a foot and give him a pill every night.

The past couple of months he’s enjoyed his forays outside, and he’s particularly relished territorial negotiations with the neighbor’s oversized puppy. Sometimes, though, he gets in over his head - not with the dog, but with the other warm weather denizens of the cul de sac, the children. One Saturday recently I found him sitting on the porch, smelling fresh from a bath we hadn’t given him, sporting a new look - an uneven crew cut between his ears and across one shoulder. He’s growing it out.