On a Saturday at a Plant Farm in Oklahoma

Silver linings are overrated

(First appeared in The Progressive Populist)

Weeks before President Joe Biden gave the worst performance in a debate anywhere at any time (for any office), before the Supreme Court of the United States dismantled the federal government in its “Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council,” and then handed Donald Trump the keys to whatever car in America he wants to steal and drive, I was at a plant farm — that was the name: Riddle Plant Farm — in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. This is a town of about 20,000, west of Tulsa. It resides in three Oklahoma counties: Creek, Osage and Tulsa. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the largest ethnic groups in Sand Springs are White (non-Hispanic) at 80%, American Indian and Alaska Native (7.3%), and Hispanic (5.4%). Blacks make up about 1.7% — or around 340 people.

This is Trump Country — he won handily in 2016 and 2020 in the counties and will again in 2024, which, if Trump wins the presidency again, I’ll make you the Toby Ziegler bet: all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets, we won’t have a presidential election in 2028 — but that isn’t my point here, except maybe to think about how we look at each other.

I didn’t see a Democrat at Riddle Plant Farm.

But what was I looking for? What do Democrats look like? What do Republicans look like? What do I look like? Are there characteristics Democratic plant buyers have that Republican plants buyers don’t?

On its website, Riddle, which has been around for 88 years or 4,576 Saturdays, states, “Every single person at the Plant Farm makes up the Riddle Family, whether you are related or not.”

I watched my wife, as well as my sister-, brother-, mother-, and father -in law — there are at least two Republicans among them — walk through the aisles, past the large fans, place items in their carts, and generally ooh and ahh over plants and flowers and $600 Japanese wind chimes. There are 380,000 known species of plants, and none are actually called weeds, whose biggest offense, it seems, is having the temerity to grow where we don’t want them to.

Gardening in America, like most hobbies in the country is expensive.

It was a Sunday in June and the sun was beating down on Oklahoma like it was angry with the state, which is understandable. There’s much infuriating here. It was a heat that was hurt. I noticed a man and a woman, both in their 40s, I’m guessing, walking by a pallet of soil. There was a swagger to them both — the T-shirts, the patriotic messaging on their hats, the bombast of their tattoos. They came with their children — I imagine that’s who the kids were — a son about 14 and a daughter about 7. The boy was disabled and appeared to be struggling with some developmental coordination disorder — dyspraxia, perhaps — so when he walked, it took all his energy. Painfully thin, his legs and arms toothpicks, his gait labored, he was tough to watch. The daughter, meanwhile, giggled at the pretty colors of all the flowers. The mother had an easy smile. The father, wearing a shirt with a bald eagle on it, his face ruddy, his paunch taunting the world, was not a guy you f*cked with.

But then there was the tenderness.

When the mother would stop and look at a display of flowers, the little girl would come to her side, but the father and his boy would stand together, arm in arm. Sometimes the boy would fall into his dad, out of love or off balance, and they would embrace. Surrounded by annuals, perennials, seeds, vegetables, trees, hanging plants, and shrubs, they would stand together holding each other. That’s all they were doing. When the father with his massive arms and hands would grab his son’s alarmingly thin arms and wrists and fingers, he did so with the care he must have shown when the boy was an infant and before doctors gave the couple the bad news. Often the father would take his son’s hands and help the boy place and trace them over a leaf.

The boy smiled, the boy made noise.

This boy was in diapers.

The boy could be at his prom someday.

The boy could be getting married.

The father was there.

The father would be there.

The father would help him down the aisle.

I imagine in garden shops all over America, in fact, everywhere in America, there were moments like this — and have always been moments like this on Saturdays like this. And for a moment, I forgot about New York City sentencing dates, sharks and batteries, upside-down flags, billowing black coal smoke from Ford F-250s, compromised conservative Supreme Court justices on the first Tuesday in July who trashed the whole operation, and the rest of the decay and corrosion and ignorance and posturing in America — and my own visa application to Portugal. A father with whom you don’t f*ck and a son for whom life wasn’t fair were holding hands on a Saturday at a plant farm in Oklahoma.