JUSTIFY YOUR EXISTENCE cont.
Howard Dante Livingston
by Wesley Livingston
He is up everyday with the sun. At 61, my grandfather is in better shape than I have ever been and it shows as he spends the majority of his days outside in his yard.
He can’t tell you the names of every plant in his yard, but he can probably tell you when he put it in the ground, or when he first noticed it growing in his yard. His house is on the edge of Ladoga’s projects, but you wouldn’t guess that from the condition of his lawn.
“The hood is just a neighborhood like everywhere else,” my grandfather likes to say. “I’m proud of my neighborhood.”
Few houses in his community keep their lawns as tidy as he does. Even if his lawn is made up of weeds, he keeps it cut evenly enough that it is still a flat plane of green that my daughters love to rolls around in when they come to visit. If I’m being honest, I still enjoy rolling in it myself. He has two big pine trees in the yard that I remember helping him plant when I was just a kid. He carved a sort of walkway in the low hanging foliage that leads to a goldfish pond that he has off to the side of his house. It is surprisingly serene and I usually sit out with my grandfather sipping beers next to the pond when I go to visit. We talk about everything, usually the women he still manages to be involved with and his future plans for his yard.
“I want something nice along the hill,” he says, “something that’ll be like a fence.” Now, the majority of his hill is covered in wood chips and low growing bushes line the sidewalk. I like where the brown of the wood chips meets the edge of his lawn. It’s a solid border until you are close up on it. No amount of exacting landscaping can make natural things fall perfectly in line, but the totality of neatly lined flower beds can give a very precise quality to any lawn.
“They see that when they pass by,” my grandfather says of neighborhood kids. “One of them stopped me while I was working one weekend to tell me my yard look better than stuff they see on TV.”
The last time that I was there, I sat in his yard next to the goldfish pond. My grandfather keeps it immaculately clean and the fishes look very plump and happy. Watching them, I wondered if they have a conception of their location. I wondered if they knew that they were on the east side of Ladoga and if they missed the place where they were born. I can’t imagine that they do. And the uncanny fact that they were corralled into that pond by a man who has such a strong sense of his home town that he had never imagined living anywhere else, was not lost on me. My grandfather is the type to bring the whole world to his yard rather than travel anywhere to see things in their natural habitat.
But it got me thinking about the human concept of home. There are people who experience distress at not being able to go home again. There are generations-long wars that have been waged to reclaim homeland. But those fishes didn’t seem to care about anything but their ability to swim and eat.
“I love those fishes,” my grandfather said when he sat next to me. “Sometimes, I wake up sore from working the day before and I probably should just sit inside and let my body recover, but I gotta come check on my fish.”
It was all a symbol to him that he was a better man than his father. My grandfather had managed to buy a house and hang on to it for decades, and he was proud that his grandson could sit with him on land that he owned.
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