Jim

My parents couldn’t have found a better house to buy. I was 4 when we finally moved into Portland from the wildlife reserve that my Dad was working on for the Nature Conservancy. My parents only had one requirement for a new home: Cheap. As they hit the market, they timidly moved from house to house with their fingers tipped in lint and their eyes on the asking price before the pattern of wallpaper. There wasn’t really any question when they finally found it. A two story house in the West Hills of Portland for $79,000 was like finding a thirty-five cent plane ticket to the French Riviera. The airplane just has a few problems.

The smell was the first and most noticable attribute of the house. The chain-smoking tenants had just fought a long and losing legal battle against the home’s owner (who, as it happened, was their father) who was trying to sell it out from underneath them. As such, they had done everything in their last few days of residency to make the home as inhospitable as was humanly possible. I, to this day, am not sure what caused the family feud that landed us our home. The elaborate and illegal drug manufacturing facilities in the basement and the fact that the home was the only one in the neighborhood that had actually seen devaluation over the past few years might have had something to do with it. My parents knew, as they picked through the knock-off wrestling tee-shirts and the exposed insulation, that they had found our home. The fine line between optimism and stupidity is often irrelevant

It wasn’t until after the move-in date and their first official payment that they drew back the dark green, mold-caked curtains over the windows in the living room. The windows, a glass wall for a huge section of the house, looked out on that perfectly clear, Pacific Northwest summer day, over the park below and onto the silhouette of Mount Hood in the distance. The view is as impressive today as it was then. They tore down those big green curtains and threw them off of the balcony into the dumpster they had in the driveway.

That window also provided my dad his first good view of the garden that he had purchased. Well, what would become a garden. The previous owners had had the presence of mild to elicit a restraining order against them from the local garbage collection agency. As such, it didn’t take much guess work to figure out what was beneath all of the mounds of displaced earth in the back yard.

All of the grass was dead. The ground jutted up at unnatural angles in various places. The entirety of the area slopped awkwardly to the West. There were almost as many rocks in the soil as there were bags of garbage. Squirrels would go out of their way to walk around the browned perimeter of the plot to get from one neighbor’s property to the other. My dad, despite his full-time job and responsibility of helping to raise two (soon to be three) children, had found a hobby.

He enlisted help, of course. The enormity of the property’s restoration requirements simply precluded its accomplishment by only one man. He recruited family friends, co-workers, and finally me and my sisters when we were old enough to wield shovels and paint rollers. And he hired Jim from around the block.

My dad met Jim when we first moved into the neighborhood and was doing the rounds and meeting the neighbors. I met Jim when I was no older than 8 and had just started putting real time in on the garden and the exterior of the house. Jim’s walk was what got me right away. Despite towering several heads above me, he had a limber, disjointed strut that is most common in children. He had lankily poor posture when he stood still and would move him arms with long, fluid motions whenever he worked. And he was always really nice to me, my sisters, my parents and my dog.

He usually showed up to work with a few snacks in his pockets that he would share with us kids and sometimes the dog when my mom wasn’t looking. He would spend long hours finding earth worms in the back yard so he and I could do experiments on them (most of which involved cutting them in half with hedge clippers and watching the halves wriggle off in different directions). And we’d swap jokes - the kind that only kids and guys in Jim’s situation can truly appreciate. Mine; the ones I learned on Saturday mornings from Nickelodeon and his; the ones he read from the library books that he borrowed.

Waiter! This coffee tastes like mud.
Yes sir, it’s fresh ground!

I wasn’t any older than 10 when I figured out that Jim was autistic, just like that kid down the street that we always made fun of in school. The autism was bad enough that Jim couldn’t get real work and he, nearly 50, certainly couldn’t move out of his elderly mother’s house. It’s probably also why my quasi-Jew mother only paid him 5 dollars an hour for long days of back breaking physical labor. She justified it by the fact that my father was always grumbling about what a slow worker Jim was.

He screwed things up sometimes, too. As comical as pruning the wrong tree or digging a hole in the wrong place can be, it tended to wear on my dad’s nerves. I’m sure the work that he did was well worth the 5 dollars an hour, but I know that firing him had crossed my parents minds on several occasions. But how in the hell do you fire the overly-friendly autistic guy from down the street? So he stayed around. I saw him every weekend until I was 13 years old, unless he had some trouble at home; which he would always diligently inform us of.

Why did the bee cross its legs?
Because it couldn’t find the BP station!

The guy would even stay for dinner sometimes. I would explain my school projects to him on Sunday afternoons and I would always say hi on my way to and from the bus stop.

Why do you always put bells on cows?
Because their horns don’t work!

I’m not sure what kind of problems Jim had with his sister, but he mentioned them to me from time to time. Mostly just that she was mean to and took advantage of his ailing mother. As much as he loved his mother, he would get frustrated with her sometimes for how she dealt with his sister. As much as he liked being around people, especially kids, he considered caring for his mother to be his most important job. He told me that a lot.

Where does a one-armed man shop?
The second hand store.

By the time I was 13, there was a rockwork terrace in our back yard that overlooked almost every species of flower and edible fruit that will grow in Oregon. Local classical and jazz bands threw parties and played gigs behind our house. I played out on the lawn every day that it didn’t rain. And I still saw Jim, a confidant and friend, every weekend.

One night in early spring, I asked to be excused from a particularly somber family dinner when my mother stopped me and asked me to sit back down with my sisters. She told me about a fight that Jim had had with his mother and sister. And she told me that when people are really hurt or sick, there are some problems that they just aren’t able to make it through. I didn’t understand why she was telling me this now or at all for that matter.

I never saw Jim again after that night. There was a peach tree in Jim’s yard like the one we had in ours. It was just outside his mother’s bedroom window. There is a small wooden cross under it that is painted white. His mother still lives there and places a fresh batch of flowers there every Wednesday.

My dad still works in the garden every weekend. And he still has my sisters and I mow the lawn and prune the trees when we’re home over break.