On the second day of November, 2021 - very late in the season for such things - Rachel made a fruit salad - bananas, apples from properties we tend and the last of the peaches that came from our garden.
Arguably, it was the most affirming thing that happened for us in the last year, or so - more memorable than the mind-boggling gain (soon notably discounted, naturally) produced by our self-managed investment account during the latter half of 2021.
It wasn't anything human-related, as might have been expected. Rather, it was plant-related; specifically, to a tiny peach pit sprout, encountered in our compost pile after the winter of 2014/15, that we mentored the development of from a fragile fragment to a hefty bearer of the first peaches we'd ever managed to grow and the most delicious we'd ever tasted.
It was those peaches that Rachel used in the fruit salad.
So why was this so significant for us? A few peaches, so big deal.
Because, in a word, it was emblematic of something often overlooked, but hugely important to the general success of society - that given the right attendant circumstances, apparently insignificant beginnings can lead to surprisingly consequential outcomes.
OK, while it may appear that THIS felicitous outcome was little more than an instance of serendipity that simply fell into our laps, that would be a gross misperception. We didn't just plop a peach pit into the ground and then wait four years for fruit to arrive.
Nothing like it!
While turning our newly established compost pile in the spring of 2015, I noticed a germinating little shoot, emerging from the split shell of a discarded pit, with its pale taproot on the other end, under a layer of humus. It takes a cold winter and a slow thaw to make this happen. Cold temperatures are needed to suppress an enzyme that, in a default way, would normally prevent the seed from germinating at any time of the year other than early spring. If that happened in fall, the delicate seedling would be killed by frost and if it happened in late spring to early summer it might succumb to heat or lack of moisture. Nature is very clever.
Any other day, I might just have turned that delicate sprout under, without a thought, like many before it. But, this time, I decided to go one better.
I knew that it would be a long shot to expect getting peaches from this tiny thing - for all I knew, we wouldn't even be in this location, even if the peach DID manage to grow in the harsher conditions of our upland locale. There weren't any other peach trees in town that I knew of to show that it could be done. Nevertheless, I thought, why not give it a try?
I carefully cleaned excess humus off the shoot and planted it in decent soil in a flower pot, so we could pay special attention to it, until it was big enough to be transplanted in some dedicated spot on the property. It grew, but it would be another year before it was strong enough to go into the ground.
Our hand was tipped by the natural death of a wonderful cat we had adopted in the previous year. We decided it would be a fitting testament to Nature's endless recirculation of life if our beloved cat could live on, not only as a beautiful tree with delicate blossoms in spring, but also as the bees that would come for pollen and nectar in the summer and as any and all who happened to eat whatever fruit the tree might produce in the years ahead - including ourselves.
Entertaining a beautiful notion is one thing; manifesting it is another. Success would require both work and sustained attention for an unknown number of years into a future that we knew was uncertain.
The morning after Pumpkin died, we chose a spot where we thought a full grown peach tree would look pleasing - juxtaposed against the building - and dug a deep hole into the stubborn ground at the southwest corner of the property. Owing to compaction from vehicles having been driven over that spot for years before we arrived, the going was slow. The process unearthed no small quantity of large stones, rusty metal objects, asbestos tiles and remnants of construction debris buried there by previous generations. After a lot of exhausting digging, we got the hole to a depth and width we thought would facilitate root growth. Then, we laid gentle little Pumpkin to rest and covered her body in alternating layers of cleaned-out soil and aged compost from our garden pile. Only then was the tiny tree, not even knee high, carefully planted.
With a stable regimen of watering - not too little and not too much - it grew fast in its new location.
But, as anyone living in these parts knows, a tiny fruit tree, left unprotected, has about as much chance of reaching maturity as a peanut butter sandwich left unattended on a picnic table in a city park in which a healthy population of crows has established itself. The problem is usually succinctly summed up by gardeners in these parts in two syllables: “Damn deer!”, in the wake of some disastrous nighttime grazing visit.
Clearly, our little upstart tree had to be protected or its life would be short. Lucky for us, the North Fork John Day River Watershed extension, a block down highway 395 from us, had many rolls of salvaged wire fencing lying around. They were happy to part with enough of it for us to erect a protective barrier around the little tree and some garden beds we had dug on the west side of the old café.
We were later able to extend fencing around the whole garden, but not before needing to prevail in a contentious dispute with our neighbors over their insistence on driving over part of our property. A professional surveyor, that THEY hired, settled the issue in our favor.
Of course, they could have given my integrity the benefit of the doubt, been reasonable and saved themselves a bunch of change, but that's rarely the way things are settled out here.
Over the next two years, the tree grew ever larger - taller than Rachel and then taller than me, at about which point, it bore its first five unsuccessful blossoms. A year later, there were scores of blossoms, but still no fruit. We knew it would take a few years for that to happen, but trusting in the fact that stone fruit trees usually propagate true to kind, we were content to just wait and give the tree whatever care it needed - judicious irrigation and a little preening to maintain good structure.
This year, our patience paid off, not just satisfactorily, but so generously that we had to tie the limbs and branchlets together. Even at that, some branchlets broke. Relative to the branch ends they're attached to, a group of peaches can appear impossibly big, strung on a tiny limb. Somehow, the fruiting limb bends down slowly under the weight without snapping, unless there's a big wind (which we did have a couple of).
In the end, we got 96 peaches off that tree, along with 17 from another one year younger. Not bad.
Post harvest, there is still work to do if the yield next year is to be good; we have to put down a new layer of sifted compost, remove dead lower branchlets and check to see whether the overall shape of any of the five trees we now have might require tweaking.
It wasn't all pleasant or easy and it took careful watering to bring through the big heatwave we had, but in the end, our peach tree was able to grow safely and do its thing.
There was a life lesson in this.
That outcome didn't just happen overnight, all by itself. It required a resolute engagement of care and attention on our part.
Nor will success just happen for any of the other four peach trees in our garden. If that were possible, there would be fruit-bearing peach trees all over every place wherever people, having eaten peaches, idly cast the pits aside, allowing new trees to grow. Personally, I've never run across a community where that appears to have occurred.
This town has been here for 160 years - plenty of time for the numerous generations of former citizens that preceded us to have established other peach trees around town. Even so, while we, in our seven years here, have established five such trees, in all the rest of town, only one other scraggly peach tree exists, which, this year, got no help surviving and languished in the seer heat, because the owner of the property had moved elsewhere. Its desiccated fruit dropped early and not even the deer would touch them where they lay.
He who doesn't relish a nice, juicy peach, ripe and straight off the tree, is an odd fellow indeed. So, one has to wonder why, in a town so blessed with whatever peaches require to flourish, virtually no one, besides us, has a tree or two, the better to help make the most of these glorious, late-summer days.
Okay, our town is only a tiny blip on the map, but in its own small way, the situation says something about the capacity of humankind to mentor, to optimal expression, the wealth of potential readily available everywhere (particularly, within other humans)- something not all that encouraging.
It takes time, steadfast faith and some degree of effort on the part of someone who cares enough for that kind of sequence from seed to tree to fruit to manifest. The idea of a multi-year period of faithfully tending the growth of very slowly developing things, for the betterment of a future world - in short, classic mentoring - is a lifestyle that is as foreign to most Americans throughout the rest of the country as it is to those in our town. Life is short. Why should one invest in an outcome you might not even be around to see?
The inescapable reality is that rising to THAT measure of dedication requires of a person attributes and disciplines which, owing to a preference for unabated convenience and entertainment, on demand, most Americans typically take a pass on developing within themselves, since doing so would demand an intensity of focus, resolve and effort that would inevitably not always be easy or convenient.
Foremost among those attributes needed to achieve ends that take time to ripen is forbearance. Without forbearance, nothing that needs time to germinate and develop can be brought to the fullness of its inherent potential.
The most important thing about this maxim is realizing that it doesn't just pertain to fruit trees and diverse life quests; it also extends to individuals, just as much as any other kind of growing entity. Individuals, particularly, require an extended period of patient backstopping by stronger individuals, through thick and thin, in better times and worse, to fully realize their potential.
Without the forbearance of the strong, backstopping of the weak cannot be maintained long enough to allow the fragile beginnings of the young, growing slowly, but soundly, to become solidly self-sustaining enough to return, in later years, multiples of whatever it took to sponsor their initial development.
I've lived in the US for close to half a century - long enough to observe that the country is littered with the remnants of half-realized dreams that should not have died on the vine and broken people in the rubble left behind that other people gave up on too easily or too quickly - all for want of an conscionable quotient of backstopping by those who could easily have helped, but didn't.
Actually, forbearance is not a singular thing. It's a complex of constituent attributes - patience, resolve, self-discipline, diligence and fortitude.
But, just in case you're tempted to give forbearance, by itself, a blanket thumbs-up, we should remember this: that, by itself, forbearance can just as readily be turned toward darker ends as socially contributive ones by those whose focus is power over others. In fact, most people who live larger than normal lives use forbearance to excel in both selfish and unselfish ways, usually in that order.
If you think about it, it quickly becomes evident that, while patience, resolve, self-discipline, diligence and fortitude, by themselves, may be excellent tools for the purposes of achieving goals, what they have to offer to the world could just as easily be channeled by some dictator into the grim realities of a nation held together by merciless enforcement of its top-down codex of laws alone, as anything we normally think of as positive in a functioning democracy.
Worryingly, (from my point of view), anti-democratic expressions of forbearance seem now to be rising in America. It's a direction the country has incrementally been drifting toward over the past four decades, or so. And though national comity is not yet dead and buried, it is perilously close to the tipping point where faith in the idea of a common fold is abandoned in a rush toward political tribalism under which it becomes every man for himself. At that point……..Ah wait; that's another subject, isn't it?
The point is that forbearance, alone, isn’t ALL that is required to bring the national success story some of us still dare to hope see manifested.
Something more is needed.
Some might posit, “Awareness!”, but even that is not enough, because awareness can just as well be elitist as inclusive. Elitism and democracy are not compatible ideas.
Yes, something more is, indeed, needed; and (lest the notion tempt) it can’t be provided by government, regardless of how much money it throws at the problem. It has to come from within people themselves.
That essential complementary ingredient required for forbearance to be unerringly benevolent, as far as I can see, is for it to be rooted in the passion to see another entity prosper without feeling the need to control. It's an attribute that every genuine, lifelong do-gooder expresses to some degree or another. Call it unconditional love, or call it natural empathy, either will do.
To illustrate this passion that one might have for another, I've included a story:
The other night, Rachel and I ran into a nurse whom we had met a couple of years ago at the hospital where Rachel was working. He was there on a temporary stint. His name is Chris and he is, originally, from Puerto Rico. As we were talking, he told us a story about how it was that he became a nurse:
He had moved to the United States in the early 1960s and worked for decades as a machinist in various shops when, one day, he received a call from the local college, which had received money from an anonymous donor who wanted to pay the full tuition required for him to become a nurse.
From machinist to nurse?! “Why not?”, he thought. He decided to take the offer. For several years, he set up the machines in the morning and studied during the day and, eventually, became a nurse, not knowing who was paying his way, until someone who was privy to who that person was let it slip. The donor was his 7th- and 8th-grade teacher in Puerto Rico!
She changed his life. Becoming a nurse has made it possible for Chris to own a home in a college town in Oregon, raise a couple of children with his wife and to pick up temporary nursing gigs all around the country and the world. Don't get me wrong, the job of a machinist is a worthy line of work, but, if ever there were a people person, Chris is one of them and, I'm sure, he has provided gentle comfort to many, many of those who have been lying in a hospital bed.
His teacher (whom he visits nearly every year) saw in her student great potential, kept in touch with him and stood by him in a very real way, until he came out on the other side. She believed in him and wanted to see him do well.
Only when ALL of those virtues - patience, resolve, self-discipline, fortitude, diligence, faith, truthfulness and empathy - are fused together in the average individual, to an extent both ubiquitous and clearly above the current extant condition, so that all things great and small, once more, begin to flourish, and the stronger side finds self-realization and pleasure in backstopping the more fragile side, will this nation, as a whole, begin the long journey back toward real strength and, in time, truly prosper.
Until then, it would be a disingenuous thing to try to put an optimistic spin on the long-term prospects for America. Being a Pollyanna in the face of Apocalypse is about the worst thing one can do; akin to exhorting the crew to pay attention to what the band is playing, while the ship takes on water.
So how does all of this relate to the peach pit?
Easy.
Just as that little peach pit did not get to being a peach-bearing tree by itself, the individuals that make up this nation will not rise to the full potential that's within them, all by themselves. Greater levels of mentoring will be needed. And, as the mentoring goes, so will go the nation, as a whole.
Nor, like the tree, should society - or the nation - be expected to effect a turnaround quickly. It will take years of sustained backstopping by stronger individuals, at every level, for other weaker individuals, developing their strengths, to reach a state of shared prosperity and security.
Is that even possible? Indeed, it IS possible, but is it probable? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. Perhaps, if they hurt enough, with the way things are going………
But, if they really DO decide that they want to take on the huge task of realizing the nation's as yet untapped potential, Americans are going to have to take on some tough nuts to crack.
To even begin, they're going to have to wean themselves off a few deeply-ingrained tenets and habits.
Chiefly, they have to drop being so attached to the idea that if you do something of great importance, you automatically get paid for it. The real truth is that there are many critically important rôles in life for which many stalwart Americans either get no monetary compensation or, if they are paid, receive only a pittance, relative to others whose contribution to the greater benefit of society is far smaller.
A monetary reciprocal is only possible when the doing of something can actually be monetized, either by a business or by some kind of professional service provider. Managing a home compost pile, rationing water use, caring for a tree, sharing the product of one's garden, stopping to take a rock out of the road, picking up the odd item of litter, adopting an animal, maintaining the sidewalk and street in front of your home, helping to reduce fossil CO2 by wearing enough warm clothing to keep the thermostat lower, putting up a bird house or two, having friends over for a home-cooked dinner, etc., etc., may seem so minor, nebulous and occasional that they cannot possibly count for much in the BIG PICTURE OF THINGS. In most cases, they cannot be discharged under the aegis of a conventional business. But discharged in a dutiful way by tens of millions, north and south, from coast to coast, without a second thought, they are, nonetheless, essential to the preservation of the condition of a truly developed society. They are things that elevated people do spontaneously, whenever needed, in a spirit of good citizenship, as they may, without consideration of financial emolument.
And that's just the beginning point of what I'm talking about - the trivial stuff. On the other end of the scale, there's a level of mentoring higher up the ladder that involves a truly serious commitment to what it means to be of service to others, not to be undertaken lightly.
That level includes examples like, say, being a parent for a second time round to your children's children, buying someone a car, helping friends and family with money to get over a rough spot, sponsoring someone’s education or business or putting up a chunk for the down payment so someone can get out from under the soul-sucking drain of having to rent. But, given that the opportunity to be helpful in minor ways pops up in multiples, everyday, the cumulative effect on the overall condition of society of minor instances of assistance, either direct or indirect, is huge.
We didn't wait to be told we would be paid for the work we put into raising that peach tree before we did it. As mentors, we acted on faith. It was our pleasure to watch it grow. And, yes, we DID get an uncommon dividend in our first harvest of peaches, but it was never guaranteed. Now that we know the peach will actually bear fruit, we hope output will only increase, for as long as anyone lives on this property, at least, for the next sixty years, or so.
Neither form of mentoring - grand or petty - supplants the need for the other. Sustained flows of every degree are critical to the maintenance of an elevated condition in society.
The inner dialogue of people who mentor is typically pretty simple. Serious cogitation isn't necessary. Generally, it follows the dictum, “If not me, then who? If not now, then when?” and, of course “Am I capable of it?”
Another dictum I'm fond of is, “From those unto whom much has been given, much is expected”. In the Bible, it's written this way, “Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required”. Luke 12, verses 47-49. I'm not a Bible thumper, but this nugget of sophistry would make good sense, whoever came up with it. The word “much” can pertain to any form of surplus over which a person has agency and, in this context, the phrase “has been given” is meant to be understood as “has accrued”, implying that the means whereby such surplus came to be in one's possession is irrelevant.
We must be clear: mentoring is very different from volunteering. Mentoring is not something that you do under the aegis of another agency that preceded you and will persist with, or without, your participation. It is something that YOU decide to do, without being prompted, all on your own. It is the dedication of some strength - time, encouragement, effort, influence, funds, protection, resources, whatever - that you have enough of to spare, so that someone or something whose existence you cherish may progress toward a desired end with a greater chance of succeeding. It is the taking of some good cause under your wing, on behalf of another, or others, quite irrespective of what others decide to do or say about it.
Sadly, as they grow older, under the relentless conditioning of modern life, many people slowly lose the reflexive propensity to be of service to others, mistaking fear and disinclination for wisdom. Whole nations, the median age of whose populations are now moving upward, lose faith in mentoring and shift politically from a progressive and contributive attitude to a regressive, receiving or hoarding mentality. Collective wealth begins to decline, social mobility grows sclerotic, inequality soars, innovation slows, artistic output stagnates and poverty across all age groups increases, as the winners in the game become fixated on the intermingling of financial advantage with the political protection of social dominance and privilege.
As one of those older folks, on the verge of entering my 74th year, with life experience on three continents to draw on, I know well how, as you age, there are ever fewer people to have to account to for your actions and more and more ways to get things for cheap, while basically sliding by, as if all of this were just the natural order of things, beloved by God. Personally, I think it's a bunch of self-serving, weak-minded hooey.
Growing older shouldn't be used as an excuse for becoming less willing to contribute and more presumptuous about what favors and privileges the world owes you, but people do it all the time. It's the absolute kiss of death for social vitality, in my opinion. One should strive ever to be useful and contributive, in whatever way Wisdom suggests you can.
Ah, but there's the rub: just how wise are we, as a nation? After almost five decades in America, I'd be lying if I didn't say, “Not very. Cleverer, yes, but not wiser, and perhaps growing less so.”
(Imagine, all of that arising out of the growth of a humble little peach pit! Not a first, mind you. I recall having read somewhere something similar regarding a mustard seed).
