What the Bull Taught Me

I've been kneeling in this garden for forty years, and my knees still remind me of every spring. My granddaughter Sophie kneels beside me now, pulling spinach from the earth with gentle hands.

"Grandpa, why don't you use that tiller Uncle Jerry bought?" she asks.

"Because some things worth doing are worth doing slowly," I say, and she laughs—the same sound her grandmother made when I said something stubborn.

That's when I remember my father, Old Bull we called him. Not because he was fierce, but because once he dug his hooves in, nothing could move him. The summer of '67, he decided our family needed a papaya tree. In Ohio. The whole town said he'd lost his mind.

He ordered seeds through the mail, built a glass enclosure, nursed that tree through three winters. The morning it finally fruited, he woke us all before dawn. We stood in our pajamas while he cut that first papaya, his hands shaking like they did when he was proud.

"Tastes like sunshine," he said, and we all agreed, though none of us had ever tasted sunshine.

"Dad," Sophie says, bringing me back, "you're crying."

"Just dirt in my eye, sweetheart," I lie.

She's looking at my phone—she says I need to learn to use it. I tell her about when cable television first came to our street. How we thought it was magic to have movies right in our house. Now everything's everywhere all the time, and nobody anywhere at all.

"Grandpa?"

"Yes?"

"Why do old people always say things were better before?"

I think about this. About the Bull and his papaya tree. About the forty years of spinach and how the same seeds never grow the same way twice.

"We don't think things were better," I say finally. "We just wish we'd spent more time running toward what mattered instead of running past it."

She's quiet for a long moment. Then she reaches for another spinach plant, pulls it slowly, deliberately. Like she's learning something worth learning slowly.

The Bull would've liked her. He would've planted her a tree.