On Having a Caribbean Gardener

The gardener is washing his truck in the driveway. He does this most Saturday mornings. It’s part of his routine at the Meerkat’s house. He was, in fact, washing his truck the first time they met. The Meerkat walked down the driveway to find a stranger scrubbing down a large blue truck. The gardener introduced himself, shifting the hose from one hand to the other in order to shake hands, and made a half-hearted attempt to appear as if he were actually watering the bushes. But as soon as The Meerkat turned away to walk down the steps into the house, the gardener returned to rinsing his already shiny Toyota Tacoma.

Now, if the Meerkat were actually paying for either the gardener’s services or our water supply this might be a problem. But we suspect the gardener is paid by the off-island landlord. And our cistern has yet to run dry. So, it’s a bit less bothersome that he uses the house’s water and driveway space to keep his vehicle more spotless than either of our own.

One Saturday morning not long after the Meerkat and I started spending all our free time together, I came over to do laundry and use the pool. He happened to be off island, and I was still staying at my own place while he was gone. The gardener wasn’t yet accustomed to my constant presence. He was used to the house being empty with the Meerkat’s frequent travels.

When I reached, I saw the gardener’s truck parked at the top of the driveway. I approached the house and noticed two pairs of shoes strewn sloppily by the entryway stairs and what looked like t-shirts haphazardly hung over the handrails. It appeared the gardener had some help this morning. But I didn’t actually see anyone about the front of the property. I figured they were cutting bush on the hill below.

I entered the stuffy house and started turning on fans and opening windows. I got no further than the dining room when I was both surprised and not surprised (a frequent paradoxical sensation in Stt) to spy a large black man floating lazily around the pool. One of his comrades was cutting bush next to the patio with a machete. The other one seemed to be drying in the sun after taking a cool dip. “Well," I thought, “there goes my plan to use the pool.”

I don’t know if they suspected that somebody was home, but shortly after I arrived, they got out of the pool and sort of went back to work. And when I say they sort of went back to work, I mean that two of them washed the truck in the driveway, while one of them used a chainsaw to whack off the overgrown bush around the house. Not that there is much overgrown bush to be whacked because as far as I can tell, the gardener comes here three out of four Saturdays a month. Either somebody must be paying him well or the perk of getting a free car wash makes it worth coming here almost every weekend.

I have since come to friendly terms with the gardener. I know his first name and we always exchange pleasantries. He is a very nice man, always smiling. I think he's from somewhere down-island. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is his second or third job. And I never feel uncomfortable being alone on the property with him. But, as you can tell, he’s definitely a gardener with a Caribbean sense of professionalism and propriety.

Last weekend, the Meerkat offered him $20 and a bottle of water to dispose of our Christmas tree. The gardener seemed happy to comply. We saw him walk up the driveway with the dying tree on his shoulder. We figured he put it in the back of his freshly-washed truck and threw it in the dumpster on his way out of the neighborhood. Later that afternoon, the Meerkat was sweetly walking the dog while I napped before my shift at the pub. At the top of the driveway, he caught a strong whiff of Christmas tree. Peering over the edge of the uncleared hill bordering the road , he could just barely see the shimmer of tinsel that remained on our tree. Apparently the gardener had simply walked up the driveway, and tossed the tree down the hill, which we learned is where he throws all the dead bush he cuts from the yard.

The Meerkat could have easily saved himself $20 and done this himself. But he would have, of course, gone to the trouble of strapping it to the top of the Corolla and hauling it to the dumpsters. And then we wouldn’t have the pleasure of smelling our still fragrant Christmas tree every time we walk the dog. So, I guess what we should really do is thank our Caribbean gardener for extending our Christmas cheer into the new year.

Dying tree pre-disposal. 

Lovin' da Local Lingo, Part 2

It’s time for more Lovin’ da Local Lingo. I’ve learned many new words since last time and have tried to incorporate them into my daily vocabulary. Sure, Caribbean words sound incongruous coming out of a bespectacled white girl’s mouth. But that’s part of the fun, yes? I enjoy surprising locals in the coffee shop by inserting a local saying mid-conversation.

For Example:

One of our dear regulars, a lovely, salt of the earth man named Steve, was in early for coffee. On his way out, he stopped again at the register to buy a paper.

“Ashley, do you have any Daily News?”

“No, dey ain’t reach yet.”

He chuckled, “Dey ain’t reach, huh? You starting to sound Caribbean, girl.”

I smiled. “Maybe someone teef ‘em”

Steve shook his head and walked away saying, “Someone teef ‘em. You’re too much.”

So children, when an item or person arrives someplace, you say that it reach.

A related term is carry. If you take a person or an item somewhere, you say that you’re carrying them/it. As in, “I gon carry my dog to da beach on Sunday.”

And if you couldn’t tell by the context, if something is teefed, then it has been stolen. If someone be teefing from you, what they’re doing is stealing. This is one of my favorites. And can you really blame me?

Stay Tuned for More... 

My Meerkat Meets the Veep in Pueblo

Hello to my thirty-seven loyal readers! I'm excited to offer something different today. A break from Ashley's prose. The Meerkat has agreed to guest blog about meeting Joe Biden last weekend in our nastiest island grocery store. I hope you enjoy his story-telling as much as I do. Yes, he uses big words. I don't know them all either, and thus have included some links to vocabulary definitions. 

The amusing – and somewhat surprising – recurring question in the flurry of responses I received to the flurry of texts I sent was not, “What was Joe Biden doing in Pueblo?”, but “What were you doing in Pueblo?”

For the uninitiated, the impetus of that question requires some exposition of Pueblo itself.

Like so many things in the VI (banks, franchised restaurant chains, “locally produced” consumer goods), Pueblo comes to us from, and is headquartered in, Puerto Rico. Pueblo, writ large, fell victim to severe financial distress in 2007. Thanks to a white-knight purchase by the owners of the Holsum Bread Company (another “local”/PR institution), I am told that many of the Pueblos on our big-sister island have recently been refreshed and are now quite nice. But the beneficence of capital has, apparently, yet to trickle-down to the VI locations, and our hometown Pueblos simply fail to meet the quality standards of a Puerto Rican grocery store.

(Let’s pause for a moment to consider the tenor and resonance of those words, “…fail to meet the quality standards of a Puerto Rican grocery store.”)

On my very first day in St. Thomas, I was told to avoid Pueblo like the plague. (Actually, the exact words were “you’ll get the plague”. But even now, fully inculcated into the Island, that warning seems incredible: Hantavirus, unquestionably; Ebola, perhaps; but THE plague, no way!)

In spite of this well-intentioned if, y’know, very mildly hyperbolic advice, I have, myself, been in a Pueblo three times during my nearly two years here. The first was about a week after initially arriving. I left empty-handed, but it was by far the most formative of the visits. As I entered the store, there was a crudely lettered sign of indelible ink on the discarded flap of a corrugated cardboard box, “We Have Fresh Meat Available”.

As is my wont, I looked for the real meaning in the rhetorical white space of that sign. Yes, fresh meat is theoretically available, but it isn’t necessarily what’s displayed out there in the refrigerated cases. To get the FRESH meat: come at the right time, make sure you’re not being followed, ask for the “other” butcher, say the secret code word, engage in the secret handshake, and flash a little cash to make it worth the guy’s effort. Unperished perishables are a privilege, not a right!

My second visit was born (or perhaps, borne) out of necessity. The first bands of a hurricane that had been threatening the Greater Antilles for over a week were bringing torrential rain and gale-force wind and a deserved sense of helpless panic. I was acutely cognizant of the fact that there was nothing that remotely resembled comfort food in my house, and I was not about to risk bone-crushing, catastrophic, irreparable devistation without a supply of Fig Newtons and Cheetos. I was certain that every other grocer on the Island had long-since shuttered-up, opting to exercise the better part of valor, and that this was likely my only opportunity. Further specious justification was that, in the aftermath of a Category 4 storm where there would be no electricity or sanitation or access to even rudimentary healthcare, it would be impossible to distinguish between foodborne illnesses and waterborne illnesses thus somehow mentally indemnifying both Pueblo and my own questionable judgment.

The third visit, the one where I met the Vice President of the United States, was, like all good things that happen to bad people, the result of unflappable laziness and unwarranted luck.

Saturday, a corporate guest moved into my home for a temporary stay. He’s an affable fellow, an employee, a passing acquaintance from when I lived on another Island in another time. Like all of us who have relocated from the Mainland, he moved to the Caribbean primarily to tend to the care and feeding of his Cirrhotic cells. And last month, in a moment of inattention and/or megalomania, I agreed to his manager’s plan to involuntarily relocate him from his Island to mine. So, while having this house guest is not the preferred situation, I brought it on myself. Besides, corporate guests support my assertions to the IRS that the house (of dubious quality) that my employers provide me in part-exchange for my services (of dubious merit) is not, in any way, taxable income!

After he unpacked, I briefly mentioned that I needed to shop that evening. This was meant only to give him a vague indication as to my whereabouts so he could gauge how much time he had to rifle through my underwear drawer and medicine cabinet. He misinterpreted it as an invitation to come with, so we agreed to meet at 6:30.

Grocery shopping in St. Thomas can be an intolerable nuisance unless you elect to view it as a challenging sport. It is widely accepted that no shopping list, irrespective of how short or how simple, can be filled completely at a single store. Further, shoppers should never assume that just because they have purchased an item at a store – even frequently and recently – that that same item still will be at that same store. So shopping requires a multivariate calculation starting with the drive time to another store measured against the temperature inside and outside of the car measured against the perishability of the items already purchased measured against the viability of recipe substitutes the shopper already has at home. A proper shop takes about as long to complete as an international cricket test match and, while I know of no formal study being done, I viscerally sense that a fair barometer of a Thomian shopper’s ability to complete a shop without a carload of curdled milk and celery with the turgor of a wet shoelace is their past success with those standardized test questions which begin, “A train leaves New York heading west at 50 miles per hour…”

So my guest and I set-out, I with limited patience and even less emotional energy for straining a conversation to find shared, substantive relevance (we both, at the time, still sober). I drove us to the place I believed offered the best chance of finding enough of the items on our list for us to declare the shop completed and return home. It is located on the south central part of the Island; it caters to the yachties; the prices are unconscionable, but the selection is good (“Island good”), and this was not a time I cared to economize.

But nope, the holiday left that grocer’s shelf picked-over and, after recovering from the cognitive dissonance of comparing what I had just spent to what I had just purchased, I realized that there were too many basics still missing. The options were to trek 20 miles east to another “upscale” market, or battle Saturday evening traffic to attend a relatively closer “big box” style supermarket or, worse, both. And any of those options coupled with prattling-on about the relative merits of coral islands versus volcanic islands was beyond my mien. So as we exited the parking lot, I heard words fall uncontrollably out of my mouth, like some locality-adjusted Tourette’s patient, “I need to stop by the Pueblo that’s across the street.”

As we walked-in, the person standing by the front door caused immediate alarm: he was white, he was wearing a sports jacket and creased trousers. By the time my mind had assimilated these incongruities, the fact that he had an earwig attached to a curly-cue cord tucked into his shirt collar and was talking into his wrist seemed, almost, not to rate notice.

There had been confirmed newspaper reports and unconfirmed sightings of the V-POTUS on our Island. Putting two and two together with a concerning lack of alacrity, I began walking the aisles. At the north end of the seventh, between the sections of cookies and cookies that try to pass themselves off as crackers was Mr. Biden carefully considering Oreos.

I am as prone to being star-struck as anyone. But on the occasions when I’ve encountered celebrity, I’ve deferred to a more reserved approach. These people are constantly beset by space invaders; sharing problems or proffering babies for kisses. People in the public eye certainly must eternally suffer Purell-chapped hands or head colds or both. And here’s a Constitutional Officer of the United States, and he’s just trying to sneak a packet of partially-hydrogenated munchies into the buggy before his svelte wife catches-on and protests. Give the guy some peace. (The self-interest in all that enlightenment is: How much more likely is this famous person to be impressed by, and remember, the one person who passed and smiled and nodded cheerfully, if curtly, in the endless sea of those seeking autographs and photographs?)

My guest, whom I had lost conscious awareness of, was following a few paces behind me, and did not share my ascetic interaction style.

“Good Evening, Mr. Vice President! Nice to meet you…” I turned to see my guest, hand outstretched. Dutifully, The Vice President shuffled the cookie packets he was holding to free his right hand.

“Well, Hell”, I thought, “the man’s now lost all momentum trying to divine the relative advantages of White Fudge Covered and Double Stuff, so I might as well go ahead and get my licks in.”

I walked back, smiled, shook, and was told that it was good to be seen today. And immediately texted every Democrat -- and a few of the Republicans – I know.

Which leaves the answers to all of the questions unasked in those reply texts:

…I don’t know. I suppose his boss got to go to a tropical Island for vacation. And since he doesn’t need to convince anyone he has an American birthplace…but, yeah, I’d’ve thought St. John too.

…But remember, the VI has zero electoral votes. So I guess that makes gaffes pretty risk-free.

…Yes, just as unnaturally white as they appear on TV. Surprisingly not the kind of thing that makes you wish you knew if he uses polonium as toothpaste – the kind of thing that makes you wish you had a black light.

…Not really, all politicians say, “Glad to see you today”. I don’t think it’s indicative of some relapse of plagiarism.

...I know, the plugs looked awful when he had them implanted. And they didn’t seem to work. Bald gracefully. But that’s just my opinion.

…Yes, a total class act, a good sport, and a welcomed visitor on my Island!