The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is today.
Chinese proverb.
1. The Hedges
I had a best friend growing up who lived right behind us. His family moved into their house at the same time as we moved into ours, which in both cases was about a week before each of us was born. I think he beat me home by 45 days. Neither one of our fathers was handy around the house, or in the yard. My friend’s father was a disc jockey on the radio and apparently a minor celebrity around town. Years later he would add to that fame by buying an Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible that he would ride around in with the air conditioning on. This was very progressive in the 1960’s. In those days, you had a convertible, or you had air-conditioning. Each one was considered an extravagance. Having both was unheard of, particularly in our staid Connecticut suburb.
Our houses were built on a recently subdivided dairy farm, Blue Ribbon Farms, so other than a couple of classic low New England stone walls, there wasn’t much in the way of markers between the lots. But our dads got together and planted some short hedges on the property line just to break up the landscape some. I think it was the last time either one of them was out in the yard.
By the time we could walk, the hedges were well over our heads. By the time we could walk unsupervised to each other’s houses, the hedges were a formidable barrier to cross and we had to fight our way through each time. They appeared to tower to the sky.
Shopping for better snacks and more, or less, supervision, we wore a dirt path between our otherwise lush green Connecticut lawns. But we could never truly tame the now towering hedges between our houses. When things got bad, as they sometimes did as we got up to our typical boy mischief, we could always hide from our parents there. They wouldn’t dare go between the hedges.
2. The Strawberry Patch
As we went from elementary school to what we called junior high school, we spent less time together and less time walking back and forth between our houses. In those days, the neighborhood dogs roamed freely and started using our path.
It would take years, and the passing of some of those dogs and some more restrictive leash rules, for the grass to reconquer that thin dirt strip between our houses.
But we still spent some time together and one day when we were about 14, my friend showed up at our door with what he explained to me was a rototiller, along with a couple of packages of strawberry seeds.
I think we may have seen a commercial for a rototiller on TV, but I didn’t know that a 14-year-old could get such a thing. And as far as I knew, strawberries were something that came in green cardboard boxes in June.
But my parents were both at work in New York City and his mother didn’t want to have anything to do with digging up their backyard, so we picked a spot on the side of the house near the hose (his idea) and started rototilling. Soon after that, we were sticking seeds in the ground, after which we, and the newly planted seeds, both got a good drenching from the hose. The next day I think it snowed, and we figured that was that.
It took a couple of weeks for the snow to melt and for my parents to notice the brown patch behind the house. They didn’t react much. They just kind of shrugged their shoulders, which was pretty much their parenting style in general. A few weeks later, however, we were well into spring, and I suppose aided by who-knows-how-many-years of pre-fertilization from the former four-legged tenants of the dairy farm, which I am sure also helped with the very successful hedge project mentioned above, a few green shoots stuck up their heads through the brown dirt.
At first, we figured they were just some random weeds. But soon we noticed that what was coming up was roughly in straight lines, and roughly evenly spaced apart. For my friend and I (and our trusty assistant, my little brother), it was “Land Ho”! It was an exciting spring as the green shoots turned into white flowers, followed by red strawberries!
3. Bigger and Better Things
After our agricultural triumph that spring, our interests continued to pull us apart. The next spring, his parents surrendered the back half of their ample yard to a much more ambitious planting, and the direct path between our houses was now blocked by a half-acre garden of carrots, peas, potatoes, and even a few stalks of corn. My brother and I, however, were not part of that project.
My friend took a less conventional path through high school than the rest of us. While my other friends’ focus was on trying to get into colleges that would impress our parents’ friends, he got a job at a car wash in a neighboring, less-affluent town. Soon after he got his driver’s license, he was driving around in the coolest car in town.
He eventually made it out west for college and got into all kinds of stuff while there. After college, we weren’t in touch much, but he did come back east, even doing a short stint in my family’s ladies’ handbag manufacturing factory, where he was rumored to have also had a nice little side hustle out of the trunk of his car….
4. A Different Kind of Planting and Blooming
By the early 1980’s, I had put down the first seedlings of what would come to be Queensboro. Life moved much more slowly in those days, and for me to get an order, a customer would have to take their business card or letterhead and put it in an envelope with a check or cash, handwrite our address, (hopefully correctly), and then find a stamp and a mailbox. In hindsight, it was a charming process. Believe it or not, we actually got some orders that way!
I soon started hearing about these machines that you could feed a printed piece of paper into, dial a phone number, push a button, and a copy of what was on that page would come out on the other side! I bought my first Mitsubishi fax machine in 1984, and I think I paid $2,500 for it (over 5 years, I believe, and probably at an interest rate of something like 18%).
I didn’t know it then, but my friend sold that fax machine to the people I bought it from. While I was starting my business, he became one of the first fax machine distributors in the country, importing machines from Asia and selling them to small retailers across the country. This was the first distribution network for what would become the electronics industry. I think you can probably take the rest of the story from here …
5. Planting and Blooming
To my friend’s credit, as well as he did, when we reconnected on and off over the following years, his greatest pride was in his wife and kids and the family they built. His business was super-fast-paced, changing at lightning speed, and increasingly dominated by mega-competitors, which was never his thing.
He got out at what appeared to be the right time for him, got a plane, and started flying around the country. Among his many projects, he was instrumental in building a very substantial building for an organization dedicated to catering to the needs of special needs children and young adults.
He flew through Dallas a couple of months ago with his daughter. They wanted to see me because his daughter had never known his mother, and my friend felt I was the only one who could tell her about what a special person she was. Indeed, despite the many challenges she had, she was a very special person. And even from a very young age, her wry smile, the twinkle in her eye, and her very special kindness have stayed with me. 50+ years later, my heart gets full, and I tear up a bit when I think of her.
We had a great visit, and he flew off the following morning to his next destination.
My mother still lives in the house I grew up in, and 65 years later the hedges are now sparse and spindly. Organic strawberries are for sale at the local market in town for $15 a quart. But what my friend and I planted all those years ago still blooms. And even when it sometimes may have looked like our friendship was as dead as a tree looks in the Minnesota winter, in the spring it blooms anew. It may look a little different on the surface, perhaps, but deep down we are still the same.
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