The Moreton Bay Fig

Tonight’s Bus story

Today was Presidents Day (no apostrophe), which is a holiday where I work, although I was surprised that so many friends my age didn’t realize it was a holiday.  Some had to think about what day it is, period.  I guess they measure the days by what’s on TV. Daytona 500 today, a day later than scheduled, so the confusion is understandable.

Anyway, I didn’t ride the bus; I worked in the garden.

It was a windy day, but not Windsday.  (That’s a lie; the wind blew a couple weeks ago, but not today. See below.) I worked for 5 hours in the garden today, after 2 hours yesterday, and that’s like 7 hours more than I’ve been out there in the past 7 weeks.  Here’s how I know:

My daughter and her family visited over the holidays, during which time our discontinued-by-Maytag-so-you-can-no-longer-get-parts dryer broke while daughter was drying a particularly heavy load and she felt so bad I had to admit  the Neptune had been nothing but trouble since we got it.

That was before Christmas.

Yesterday, the slacks I wore for Christmas dinner were on top of my gardening slacks, which I had worn 2 weeks before Christmas.  It was 3 weeks after Christmas that we finally got the dryer fixed – under extended warranty – and then I got sick for two weeks. Then there was the Super Bowl. Or maybe it was SB/Illness. Hard to keep track any more. But at least 7 weeks.

At one point during my gardening, I commented to my Gardening Partner that today was a perfect day for gardening, not too hot and not too cold.

“And no wind,” GP added. (See above.)

What got me out to the yard was the texted photo, from GP, of the ficus tree blown over back when we had the wind.  The ficus tree lives in a very large ceramic pot glazed in a speckled blue glaze (!) atop a $26.99 Home Depot potted plant caddy, 5 wheel version, on the sidewalk between the pink grapefruit tree and the navel orange tree, near the DirecTV dish. Before that, it lived in one of those reddish clay pots that I broke one day trying to move it out of the path, then patched together with Gorilla Glue, which held for 3 or 4 years.

You can’t just go to the nursery and buy the size container required for my ficus.  It borders on commercial size, the kind you see at low-rise office parks in wide open places like Irvine and West Des Moines and Plano, the ones with integrated jack points which is what gave me the idea to get the plant caddy that is rated for 500 lbs. We had to go to specialized stores all over a 50-mile radius on three consecutive Saturdays before we decided that the commercial building materials yard on Foothill, where we had found the previous pot, had what we wanted.  I just hoped we could get it into the back seat of a 2008 Civic again, so I wouldn’t have to pay for delivery.

Ficus is the genus of fig trees. Fig trees grow to fill the available space.  They are sub-tropical/tropical and battle for space with everything around them.  The Bodhi tree was a fig tree. A fig tree, The Great Banyan near Kolkata, India, was “once the largest organism known,” according to Wikipedia.  One called The Moreton Bay Fig in Santa Barbara is mentioned as the largest fig in the United States. Ours felt like the second largest.*

Uprighting the toppled ficus was not a problem, a one-person job that could be accomplished by a man recovering from the unnamed infection that’s getting everybody these days. Getting it back on the caddy was, however, a two-person job, and it blew over twice in the two weeks I was sick. Repotting it was more than a 2-person job, but since the young and strong neighbors weren’t home, we had to be creative.

That’s where the extra scrap wood and bricks came in handy.  A sturdy length of 2-by-4, a 6-inch concrete block, and a place to stand, and we levered that 400-lb root ball and slid it into that ceramic blue-glazed pot like they were MFEO (made for each other). I said a silent prayer of thanks to Fr. Donal McCarthy for those geometry lessons so many planting seasons ago, when Nixon was still in his first term.

I flashed back to that day we replaced the old wringer washer and steel and cast concrete sink in the garage in my childhood home in the early 70’s, the height of my weightlifting days.  We were a DIY family, meaning we didn’t pay for delivery and installation.  We enlisted the help of neighbors and friends, someone with a truck, someone with electrical skills, someone with plumbing skills.  But when it came to moving that steel and cast concrete sink, the grown-ups couldn’t figure out how to move it.  While they took a beer break, I moved in, lifted the sink off the stand, and set it down in the center of the garage.

“Big and strong baby boy,” my Mother commented quietly. I don’t think she knows I heard.

40 years later, I was playing in a band, and we had PA Speakers that we generally set about 5 ½ feet above the floor atop sturdy tripod stands.  The guitar player and I had a system for set-up and tear-down that included four hands on the speaker and a countdown – one-two-THREE –  followed by two middle-aged grunts as the speaker either went up or came down.

One night, the guitar player’s son sat in with us on sax. Skinny little kid, maybe 19 at the time. Played like a wizened impresario.  Blew the roof off the joint.  During tear down, I watched him lift the speakers off the stands and set them down like they were potted plants.

These days, I prefer levers.

*Not true.  There are a bunch of very large figs in Balboa Park in San Diego. I have posted pictures.