Home Gardening

57) Jesus said, "The Kingdom of the Father is like a man who had
[good] seed. His enemy came by night and sowed weeds among the
good seed. The man did not allow them to pull up the weeds; he
said to them, 'I am afraid that you will go intending to pull up
the weeds and pull up the wheat along with them.' For on the day
of the harvest the weeds will be plainly visible, and they will
be pulled up and burned."
http://listserv.american.edu/catholic/other/gospel.thomas
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This idiotic notion persisted until recently. It's a very sad story. The farmers in this area would have found this method of farming believable. It became life-threatening for my father to go to the old farmers who worked this land around here by the ways of their fathers. Almanacs at best.

Really. Usually read by the wife of the leading farmer in the neighborhood who had to do it because nobody else much could read. Book-larning was considered a hoity toity affectation only practiced by itinerant, barely educated lawyers, and nomadic, fiery-eyed evangelical preachers like Billy Graham who threatened them with God Almighty if they didn't dig a little deeper.

They were intractably resolved to planting and reaping and sowing when the leading citizen did it. They had crazy rules about even listening to the local radio, and like today, thought their kids would be despoiled by the media and the silly radio programs like Fibber McGee and Molly.

That's why North Carolina had to enact a law to hire agriculture teachers for every high school in the state. They literally had to pass laws to force these local yokels to send their children to school, and to hire people to enforce that law. Most of this legislative activity happened toward the end of the Great Depression, but it picked up where it left off after World War Two.

It liked to have killed my father on a personal, subjective level however, that is, to be hired to change the status quo which he felt in his heart to be the most idealistic way to live he'd ever encountered when we first moved here from Mississippi. Literally, by the time he retired from teaching and advising farmer's sons to get educated for themselves, and to learn to farm using the latest scientific techniques researched at the State universities, the farming industry was taken over my big money, and the local family farms that were the basis of my father's idealistic pronouncements about heaven on Earth, were for the most part, gone.

I've worked crosswords since I was a young boy. Even after I started buying spiral-bound notebooks of fifty or so Sunday-sized NYT puzzles I didn't realize that I was going to the Games section of Barnes and Nobles to pick and choose them.

I only realized that when they moved the location of the puzzle books inside the nearest store, and when I asked a clerk where they were, she looked quizzically at me for a moment and said, "Oh, you mean the Games section. We moved that to the other side of the center aisle."

I was miffed to realize my self-taught sacred rituals were rated commercially as "games". I wandered around for hours in shock. I knew exactly who I was unconsciously looking for to sooth my frazzled nerves. In situations like these, I always made passes at girls who wore glasses.

Okay, so they just bitches to help me through the night, but there's a certain type, you know, that will listen to me lie about anything as long as I tell them, "I love you." My anima isn't jealous. She doesn't wear glasses or even get old. She forces me to witness nubile young girls turn into wobbly old hags, and then asks me, "Whatta ya think of me now... wise guy?"