ViSITING PROFESSOR's GARDEN

In the small duration of that space, he mentioned his father more than a dozen times. It’s always with him. I wonder what his passing away meant for him.
The garden was massive.
There’s always a fluidity to his speech.

Often the conversational atmosphere is imbued with a light touch of melancholy
The University has no soul.
My father taught them how to invent this seed
There’s a general sense of melancholy. It’s not in the words. It’s in his mindset / bodyset.

When did I ever see him superbly elated and proud, confident?
It was in those Peruvian lectures, when he touched on a specific point. It triggered a particular memory of true adventure. Of a unbelievable alignment of thoughts that led to a conclusion of a possible “discovery.”
When he talked about the underground channels  / galleries of Chavin, and showing the digitalized renditions.
When he showed his wife afar in the prehistoric caves out there
Back then, there was hope , before we are 60 , we always perhaps have hope that we can find something, make something, have a turn of events that changes how we are remembered
But I think he has reached a point
And perhaps many of us will reach that point that we lucidly know
With each passing day, that possibility diminishes by a tremendous lot

I learned that day that Grapefruits can hang on top of the tree for two years without rotting.
Ethan and I shared a citrus from the “Citron” tree or that Orange/Graperfruit hybrid that kind of edges on  the look of  a young pomelo .
I liked how the sourness was eliminated through the exchange of genes. Not too sweet.

Peppers can be quite promiscuous. One of the few humorous moments that the Professor shared.

Rosa even showed us the dig’s bills and logistical things she’s got to do, and along with each sentence there’s a huge sigh or sound of annoyance. There’s a fierce Latin American attitude to it.

“She’s fed up with it.”
“If I don’t discover anything in the next two years, and I’ve been excavating for 30 years, then it really is it for me. “

For how long do we hang on, to finally let ourselves go?

All the entrepreneurs, mid-level managers, parents even, who are out there.

He admired his father for almost everything. And one of them  is being a workaholic and often taking the kids together onto field searches for new varieties of plants.

He carries on his father’s story. And yet when I try to search for this inspirational man on Google through references to UC Davis, to botany. Nothing returns. There are no digital traces of him. His papers / books may lie somewhere deep in a library. But I can’t just simply search Rick’s father. I’ll have to really know his name, his work. And it could be a hundred years before anyone take a serious look at what he had done.

It might will be a nonfiction writer, hoping to make his own name out there 100 years from now, who wants to cover about seed inventions. Plants. Maybe at a point when most original seeds are forgotten. All that’s left will be laboratory concocted seeds. All we’ll be eating will be none that the earth was “born” with.

“How did you get them into powder form? Any special way? Stone slab grinder”
“Haha. No. Coffee grinder.”

It tasted like dissolvable coffee in terms of texture.


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For a brief moment, I seem to be more at ease with myself. More ok with my lack of accomplishments.