The Weed Whisperer

As I yanked them, some as high as my thigh, I warned them to cease and desist. As they broke above the entrenched root, I swear I heard them laugh. I pledged I’d be back.

As I toted away my victims, I wondered how I’d ignored that side yard of my Clovis home for so long. Oh yeah, allegiance to email and paperwork, with the odd trip to the driving range. I was amazed how relaxing it was to avoid thistle but still restore sanity to a fraction of my personal wilderness. The docs at Community Regional Medical Center would have been proud.

Recently, their mantra was relaxation. I am the consummate hard sell. But over a couple of days, interspersed with tests requiring a pitchfork to get past the acronyms, I tried — watching TV programs I’d usually breeze past and paging through sections of newspapers that I’d put in the bird cage – lying half-awake, on a narrow motorized bed.

Never knew about the flying snakes of Asia — leaping 20-some feet from tree to tree, landing on their stomachs. (Gosh, hungry again. It’s amazing how hard Regional’s food deliverers work, going room to room).

Never knew what the Grizzly Man looked like, or the videos he shot for years, before one of his brood of grizzlies finally killed him in his solitary wilderness of the Yukon. (There’s a forgotten feeling sometimes being hospitalized, and it was always heartening to see folks being visited by family and regularly cared for.)

Never knew that announcers (could scarcely call most of them journalists) on Fox, CNN and the Weather Channel have transformed their jobs into aerobic exercise — shouting, cooing, cackling; and what’s up with all the hands and arms flailing all over the place? Is this “Dancing With the Stars” meets “The Bachelor” meets the World Wrestling Federation? (Calm down, Taylor, just recall how physically fit and nimble the busy patient transporters are every day at Regional.)

Never knew, till I read it in the New York Times, that a Swedish inventor has come up with a way to deal with the lack of toilets, and often concurrent explosion of diseases, in the world’s urban slums. It’s something called a Peepoo, a single-use, biodegradable plastic toilet. (Suddenly, being asked for a “specimen” is no biggie.)

Can’t say I’ve “upgraded” to a Type B personality. But when I last looked out at my yard, I’m sure I saw a nervous dandelion skitter behind a forsythia.