Is This Heaven?

     Do you remember the film that looked and sounded like a baseball movie but was really about a father and son?  In the film the father and son are playing "catch," and afterwards the father stands in this perfect diamond, lighted for night play, wonder in his eyes, and takes a wide-angle view of the outfield fence, cornstalks as high as a batting cage; and he asks the son, "Is This Heaven?"  And the son answers, "No, it's Iowa."
     It was like heaven at my grandparents' place in northern San Diego County, the avocado capital of the world.  Starting six or seven years before his retirement from a long and arduous job with Union Pacific Railroad, they bought three acres on a hilltop, built their own own house, laid the watering lines, planted the avocado trees, fenced the place and joined Calavo, the growers exchange.  When he turned 65 they moved into the house, continued to work the grove and settled in as farmers.  From the time my parents thought I was old enough to be left there for a weekend or a while, and until I was in college, there were no greater things for me to be than my granddad's golden retriever and assistant picker.  I spent nearly 400 nights with them over the years; and the routine never changed, except on Sunday when we three piled into their 1948 Plymouth business coupe and went to church and then "called on" some neighbors for Sunday supper, and then conversation when the women and most of the children gathered in the kitchen, while the men and some of the lucky boys stood in the yard with sweet tea and talked about "cukes" and "off-blooms" and "hasses" and "fuertes" and "cinnamon root rot" and bragged about how many pounds of fruit could be picked off of the "queen" tree in the grove.
     All the other days were studies in consistency, hard work, long hours, all about avocados and time with granddad.  We started before dawn, fired up the tractor and hitched up the wagon for the boxes of fruit.  We opened the whirlybird sprinklers -- there under the trees among the mulch of fallen leaves which crunched underfoot.  We looked for broken lines, and if a repair was needed, we had to cut the galvanized pipe (no PVC with easy glue) and put the threading on with a special tool.
     After breakfast, we sat for a spell while she in her white naugahyde rocker crocheted or knitted, the latter making a "click-click-click" that more or less kept time with the chair.  He in his red rocker stoked up his pipe, always Prince Albert tobacco that came in a flat can.  As I write this I can look up and see the pipe stand which he crafted, because now it is in my house.  It is a small box on turned legs with copper lining and his ash tray inside.  He held the pipe in his left hand and struck a wooden match and put it close over the pipe bowl.  With the stem in his mouth he would draw a breath, and the flame would dance and flicker and bend and stoop and draw down into the tobacco, and he packed it with his thumb.  This room where we sat was the only place he would light up in the house; it was the day porch which they used to go in and out during working hours, and where I slept and sat across from this tableau of Jim Ned and Leona Johnson "rocking out" so to speak, sharing their morning devotions.  (Look for another blog entitled "Mighty Fine," coming soon.)
     Back to work!  We picked and sorted the avocado crop.  We did some pruning.  Weeding.  Tilling.  If anything else needed to be fixed we headed to the shop, where my grandfather also fashioned tools of his trade to pick the high fruit without damage to either the fruit or his back.  Wherever we went, he drove the small tractor, and his grandson sat on the back of the trailer, leaning on a crate, legs dangling off, a wide-brimmed hat handed down, eating an avocado right off the limb.
     Pure Norman Rockwell.  Close to heaven for a kid.
     After lunch time, nap time!  Jim Ned didn't just "take ten" on the sofa.  No sir!  He took off his work clothes, put on his pajamas, pulled the shades, got under the covers and did some real deep REM with snores that rattled the windows.  90 minutes.  I come by this honestly.  You know, it might be considerd more than a mere nap, but don't knock it.  He worked that grove until he was 87 years old, and the only reason he didn't work it longer is because he passed out in the DMV and they didn't renew his license.  Probably missed his nap that day.  So the grove passed unto disuse, and his 16-year old Plymouth with 96,000 miles passed unto me.
     But that was later.  When he'd get up from his nap he'd dress again, lacing up his button-hook work boots, pulling on his tan pants and tan work shirt, and we'd go back to the grove.  If we needed to take a necessary break, the house was off limits with dirty shoes.  We used the chicksail, also know as a latrine or outhouse!  A little wooden hut with a quarter-moon cut in the door, and -- no kidding -- a Sears catalogue for wiping.  There was absolutely nothing charming or sylvan or nostalgic about it; the smell could kill you.  Yet my grandfather who was born in Oak Hill, Texas, in "eighteen AND seventy-seven" as he put it, called it his "sanctorum," and he never really got used to indoor plumbing. 
     After dinner we sat on the west-facing front porch in the Adirondack chairs which he built.  We looked over hundreds of acres and thousands of trees, a sea of no-other-green like avocado leaves disappearing into the ocean eight miles away.  We sipped lemonade or enjoyed a piece of my favorite dessert, always there on my visits.  Lemon Bisque!  Just like the pipe stand and the threading tool and the fruit picker and the sweat-stained Stetsons -- his and mine -- the recipe is also mine now; and my children devour this lighter-than-air confection handed down from a great-grandmother they never met.  We watched the sun go down into the Pacific, and we turned in early.  We had to; otherwise how could we get up at 4:45 to start the next day among the most wonderful of climbing trees?
     I have asked myself many times, "Was it heaven?"  No, it was Vista, California.