Barbarians at the Gate and Goths in the Garden
The Gig Worker, the Barbecue and the Apple Tree
It was the end of summer. It was the last barbecue of the year.
Caveman-like, I was on the patio tending the fire and preparing to lay out hamburgers on the grill with a spatula. The skies were blue. Birds cheeped chirpily. Boats sailed across the tableau of Lake Washington. All was well in the world. Except that thirty feet away my wife stood shock still at the front door staring anguished and wide-eyed out at the street.
There she stood for at least a quarter minute until I finally asked what's the matter? She pointed due west and called out something I didn't clearly understand except for alarming words signifying, more or less, that Barbarians were at the Gate, Gothic Invaders had breached the Walls and Dragon-headed Viking Drakkars had landed on the Beach!
Notwithstanding contemporary prattle that the sexes are indistinguishable, almost every man - and certainly every married man - carries, tucked away on one leg of the peculiar Y chromosome, a special gene. And that gene, when triggered by the plaintiff cry of a damsel in distress, instantly stimulates the production of a bellicosity hormone that arouses prehistoric instincts to protect home and hearth. Primeval male proclivities being thus duly stimulated by the wifely cry for succor, I rushed out to the street to confront Barbarians, Intruders and ax-wielding Vikings and found, instead... someone's car with magnetic Door Dash insignia stuck on its sides idling post-delivery by the curb next to our yard.
We hadn't ordered anything. We don't use Door Dash or any other "gig" delivery service.
The Door Dash guy (for he was, to all outward appearances, indeed a "guy") sat cavalierly in front of our house munching an apple. One of our apples.
I must digress.
Years ago, we planted apple trees in our front yard. These are miniature heirloom trees that we have nurtured from saplings. We fertilized them with compost made from our own organic kitchen vegetable scraps. We carefully built trellises for the little trees and suspended the branches so the heavy fruit wouldn't break their branches. We weeded and pruned them and watered them by hand. Each Spring, when the apples begin to form, we have wrapped each individual fruit in an enclosure that looks rather like the toe end of a woman's nylon stocking (or like a condom, depending on the warp of your imagination). We attach the stockings when the fruit is small and they fill out as the apples grow within them.
This is hard work - it takes many hours to wrap every single apple by hand and tie a knot at the stem - but it's the most effective way to discourage animal and insect predation without using chemicals. Birds and raccoons that would ordinarily feast on the pretty red-and-yellow fruit are turned off by the icky tan nylon covering. Those that try a taste do it only once because a beakful of nylon ruins any meal. The enclosures also prevent flies and coddling moths from burrowing into the apples and laying their eggs. As a result of these mighty efforts, we harvest a small crop of juicy, flavorful and parasite-free Honey Crisp and russeted Queen Cox apples.
And here was Mister Door Dasher, probably having delivered to someone else a load of industrial grade pizza and calzone, sanguinely devouring the organic fruits of our labor just like a human parasite!
My Neanderthal instincts battled with my higher conscious. Meh, I remonstrated with myself, it's just an apple. So what?
Victor Hugo's Les Misérables echoed in my mind - the poor protagonist, Jean Valjean, stealing bread to feed his sister's family. Caritas. Feed the poor. And all that good stuff. My higher conscious remembered that when I was five years old living in Naples, we - my older brother and I and our mischievous Italian friend who lived upstairs - would occasionally crawl into the orange groves and vineyards next door to snatch some fruit before il Padrone's field hands discovered us and chased us out with their pitchforks and dogs. Hmm hmm, mused my higher consciousness. Those who live in glass houses, and all that. Hmm hmm. Kids can't be expected to know right from wrong. Hmm hmm.
But this was no pitiable, starving Misérable eating our apples. And he wasn't five years old, either. I saw that this was a twenty-something, well dressed and clearly well-nourished gig worker. His face bore a smug Justin Trudeau-like expression (was he Justin Trudeau?). He appeared to be a moonlighting college student. He was driving an almost brand new E-vehicle that Daddy probably bought for him. That model car costs well north of $75K, possibly more. This guy knew right from wrong. He just didn't give a damn.
And it wasn't just one apple. He had already eaten several. He had casually thrown the eaten cores on the street and littered the little protective nylon bags haphazardly in our yard. He stared insouciantly and challengingly at me through the windshield as he chomped away, all the while reaching through the passenger side window to snatch yet another apple.
The Neanderthal in me leaped out of my basal ganglia, wrapped his hairy hands around my throat and began to strangle my higher conscious. In an instant,Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and all compassion disappeared. There stood the Barbarian, the Goth, the Horn-helmeted Viking Dasher pillaging our food, our time, our labor! "WTF are you doing?!?" I shouted at the erstwhile mendicant now demoted, in my mind, to no better than a shop-lifter or a smash-and-grab looter. This creep was like some perverted Xmas Grinch who drops down the chimney on Christmas Eve and steals rather than leaves gifts under the tree.
"I thought they were free," the Door Dasher responded flashing a toothy grin. He snapped off one apple and reached for another. He didn't say it, but his expression sneered: what are you going to do about it, anyway, little man?
I must digress again.
Chronologically, many decades separated us. Age and Newtonian physics favored this twenty-something troglodyte more than me. He was taller, younger and beefier than me. All I had was chutzpah, righteous indignation and the home field advantage. Of course, I also had reinforcements - my spouse, previously referred to, who still stood menacingly at the door ready to block any forced entry into the commissary or to tackle anyone who might tackle me.
I stood in front of the Door Dasher's car - what on earth was I thinking? Was I going put out my hands to hold back the car with biceps and will-power should he decide to drive off and run over me?
I was armed, of course, with the eight inch wood spatula that I had been holding and had forgot about when I received the urgent Call of Duty. Without thinking, I had automatically kept the barbecue utensil in my hand. But this was Seattle: was it a crime to brandish an unlicensed automatically held eight inch spatula, even in self-defense? Were there not stories about teenage gangs mugging people while armed with forks and spoons? In reaction to the violence, had not local politicians declared a "public emergency" and banned the carrying of forks and spoons, including high capacity spatulas? I imagined a procession of wailing police cars descending to arrest me for threatening the Door Dasher with a hamburger flipper. Then I realized that there are fewer cops than tattoo artists left in Seattle since the City's de-fund the police days and, when seconds count, they are now just several barbecues away (if they respond at all). No, there would be no constabulary response to the barbarian invasion, nor even to answer the call of assault with a spatula.
I was on my own. Homeowner, Knight Errant and urban Manor Lord versus the Door Dashing, Gate-Crashing Barbarian.
I stepped away to one side of his car. I gestured first at him and then at the helpless apple tree with my spatula (in a friendly, non-aggressive way, of course). As I did this, I noticed that the gentleman (I use this nomenclature advisedly) had already snatched half a dozen more apples than I realized. They were sitting, still wrapped in their nylon wrappers, on the passenger seat of his tony e-vehicle. All in all, he had already eaten or snapped off a sizable percentage of the total yield and, probably, was aiming for a clean sweep.
I yelled at him (without even first asking what his preferred pronouns were):
"This is our property you [bleeping] ^$%&@!* and this is our tree! We built the trellis! We wrapped each and every fruit! We watered and fertilized everything ourselves! This is our sweat and labor of love! How could you possibly think that the apples were 'free' for the taking?"
Or words to that effect.
Mr. Door Dasher took another casual bite. He was unmoved by my speech and unimpressed by me. "They're really good," he said smugly, completely ignoring my question. He smiled nonchalantly and took another chomp.
We glared at each other. Then I lost it. My inner Neanderthal was loose!
I, the Neanderthal, reached through his passenger side window and gathered up the purloined apples sitting on the seat. I surprised myself, but he, also, was too surprised to react.
"Get the $%&@!* out of here!" I, the Neanderthal, barked.
To my surprise, he did. The Door Dasher dashed off to the North, to Valhalla, where all Barbarians, Goths and Vikings hail from. En route, he blithely tossed one more apple core out the window into the street, a final display of respect for me, for the neighborhood and for society in general.
* * * * *
POST SCRIPT
The preceding story is true and only lightly seasoned with literary license. There was a second part to this, however, that I have written, rewritten and discarded a dozen times.
I intended to slide from my story about our Door Dasher into a screed about other barbarians at our gates - the financiers, the rentiers and plutocrats, the array of politicians, here and elsewhere, who lie, cheat and steal. I wrote that screed and then I deleted it. Nobody wants to be lectured.
I was going to author a lament about how so many young people today are rude and crude. But I don't want to be a Mean Old Mister Mustard, so I deleted that, too. Anyway, truth be told, we were all pretty rude and crude when we were kids. It is an evolutionary imperative that the current generation must rebel against the preceding one. All of us at a certain age behaved the same, more or less, and all young people of the future will, too... until, later, as adults, they are sobered by debt and wisened by responsibility, exhaustion, doubt, and the inevitable awareness that one's life has a terminus.
It is true that the Camelot years of the 1960s and 70s felt different than today. But that's because they were different. Movements to end the Vietnam War, to end discrimination and to end the arms race were on a higher plain than transgender rights and the freedom to choose one's own pronouns. The idealism of the 60s, however naive, has apparently dissolved into a kaleidoscope of marginally idiotic causes. Certainly by design (and definitely propagated from above by vested economic interests) these quickly shifting and marginally idiotic causes eviscerate class awareness as they purposefully sap strength from any movement truly meaningful.
But do I really need to grind this barrel organ more than others similarly grinding and ranting on social media?
Delete. Delete. Delete.
I attempted a commentary on the old nurture versus nature conundrum. I typed up something favoring individual choice and responsibility, but for the fact that we are always constrained by the times we inhabit.
I wrote that these are constraining, almost claustrophobic times; that the incessant spin of political and commercial and economic narratives gives me vertigo; that the Zeitgeist of the 21st Century tastes sour, like wine turned to vinegar, like old curdled milk.
All true; but I questioned whether I could really fly that far off into deep purple space from a run-in with a single bone-headed Door Dasher.
Delete. Delete. Delete.
I even dabbled at social psychology. I wrote something banal comparing people to animals. I wrote that, unlike rabbits, whose young instinctively know what to do at birth, humans must learn how to survive, how to think, how to behave. I wrote that, like all animals, we primarily learn by imitation. Humans mimic the example of peers and elders, just like wild birds and bears and coyotes do.
I observed that both major U.S. parties and those that predominate in Europe, in the British Commonwealth, and among U.S. allies in the Middle East and Asia, are all negative mafiosi-like role models whose principals' principles are dishonesty, disrespect, avarice, deceit, violence and bullying. I wrote that as poor role models as the politicians were, just as bad (if not worse) were Wall Street, our lockstep media monopolists, Big Tech, Big Pharma, the sports-entertainment industry and even our diminished jurists and educators. With so many shameless bad influences in a world mediated by tawdry influencers, how, then, could I blame my local Door Dasher for being such a schmuck?
Nah.
It was all too obvious and too much like a rant. Delete. Delete. Delete.
And so I exhausted myself trying, and failing, to making a deeper point with a simple story.
I do remember, however, that we went on with the barbecue. We had a very fine dinner. For dessert we each had an heirloom apple. Home-grown. Fresh from the tree.
The apples were really good.
