A Garden of Memory

As I get older I've come to realize that I've made an unconscious effort to recreate parts of my childhood. I'm not cavorting around the house re-enacting scenes from the Empire Strikes Back with my Star Wars toys or anything (possibly fun to do, but caught outside the presence of a niece or nephew is a sign to call in professional help), but I'm building specific past-times into my life that my parents once held domain. I change my own motor oil in my car, I bake bread using my mom's old bread pans, and I plant flowers and vegetables, for example.

Above is a picture taken in 2007 of my garden when I lived in Winnipeg. This little strip garden allowed me to grow tomatoes, carrots, peas (trained to climb sticks and fishing line to reduce sprawl), beans, radishes, garlic, and marigolds – to help keep out pests. I also had two 24x36 inch wood crates in which I planted basil, oregano, thyme, and chives.

And these were just the edible portions of my little green thumb.

I took a lot of pride in them as I had planted each from seed. I set up lights in my basement for the seedlings to take root, and by June, I'd have planted the seedlings into the ground. I was always fascinated to see my plants at their full growth stages by the end of summer. They tasted fantastic, and familiar. Not familiar in the way foods should taste. That's the least we can ask for, especially if we get them from a grocery store. But these foods evoked memories in me that I had forgotten.

As long as I can remember my family has grown a garden. The garden we had as kids was about 15x30 metres in size and it grew a lot of food. We also had a separate potato patch at my grandmother's double that size. It was a lot of work, but when the whole family contributed, well, you've heard the saying, "many hands make light work." We probably had the energy to do the work because we ate healthy. My mom still grows a garden, but on a smaller scale. As she has gotten older, I asked her once if she still has the energy to plant a garden. I recall she laughed and said something to the effect of, "I don't know what I would do with myself if I didn't have one."

I always get a weird, transportive feeling when I eat fresh vegetables from a garden. I especially love carrots straight out of the ground. I pull out a carrot, brush the dirt off, run water out of a hose to wash it, and take a bite. The flavour sends me back several decades every time, even more decades as I get older. I recall my dad used to laughingly call me "Bugs" when he saw me do this (what parent didn't). It's one memory I will always keep close to my heart.

The home in which I live does not have an appropriate area in the yard to grow vegetables. I also have dogs now and they likely would, by no fault of their own, be curious enough and haphazard enough to destroy it. This year, my wife's uncle down the street tilled an area of his lawn for my wife and I to use. I planted a few things, but most importantly, several rows of carrots. When the time came to eat a fresh carrot out of the ground, I pulled it from the earth, cleaned it off, took a bite, and was immediately sent back to my youth.

The taste of memory makes me smile every time.

The Gravity of Apple

Finally, at 5:30 p.m., August 24, 2010, I looked into my hands with tired eyes at my iPhone 4. I had just completed a marathon wait of over eight hours to own this treasured device.

I know, crazy, right? But I was one of hundreds who came every day to Winnipeg's Apple Store just to have a chance (yes, a chance) of owning an iPhone 4. Apple stores across the world easily ran out of iPhone's before they did customers. By the time I was guided into the store to get mine, there were only about a dozen iPhone's remaining for the day. The only memories I have of waiting in line for anything before this was for rock concert tickets in the early 1990's before the advent of online ticket sales.

For me, this best describes the emotion Steve Jobs intentionally/unintentionally created for his products. They are rock stars, and if you owned anything Apple, you were part of a kinship that stretched across the entire planet. This kinship was never more strongly felt than with Steve Jobs' death on October 5, 2011.

I first heard the sad news on that harbinger of Breaking News, Twitter. I tapped into my feed to blithely scan the days events to see @glendaollero, a former college classmate, simply express, "Oh, Steve. :((("

The world had known that Steve had resigned from Apple as its CEO six weeks earlier due to his health. I felt the worst had occurred, and sadly, I was right. Steve had lost his valiant fight with cancer. I immediately switched the television to CNN. Reports and tributes poured in from millions of people who thought of Steve like he was the beloved uncle they never had time to spend with. People created memorials at the news and lit candles, left flowers, cards, and yes, apples, at Apple stores in cities all over the world.

Through the devices Steve created, many of us felt connected to his vision. Steve was a technological rebel whose innovations rose above (I think) even his own expectations. Apple's product reputation is built on the premise that, "they simply work." By merely adding electricity to an Apple device, it lived up to your expectations within minutes.

A caveat. I've only ever owned Apple computers, but it's for the reason that I just described above. By simply adding electricity, Apple devices have given me, and millions of others, years of virtually stress-free computing (the one time I thought my iMac had died, it had become unplugged). None of my Apple products have ever failed to a point of repair. Reliable software updates and product improvements have made this a reality, and the only Apple product I no longer use is my first, bubble-shaped, iMac G3. I no longer use it because it was stolen years ago during a break-in. Thieves typically have a sharp eye for quality.

Thomas Edison designed inventions that captured electricity and improved the lives of hundreds of millions in the process. Steve Jobs captured the same innovation at Apple and seized the interest and imagination of the entire world.

@RIPSteveJobs  1955-2011