HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE

Sometimes my body feels tired in the morning and I’m unsure what to do after praying. I sit in meditation for twenty minutes and the answer still doesn’t come. I take video of a baby sugar apple that I helped along by being a beetle, a beetle with a human hand and a paintbrush, a beetle that watched the pollen drop onto the hairs.

New Orleans is a sauna before eight in the morning. There is a blister on my thumb because I worked outside the day before without gloves. This is why you sometimes see those men that roll between traffic in riding lawnmowers, hitting the grass fully masked, fully covered from head to toe, riding like bats out of hell and spitting grass in all directions. I didn’t get far enough to see a man like that.

I stop in the middle of Perrin. A man gathers piles of grass into a wheelbarrow with a hand and a rake. I thought that he looked Vietnamese. I saw the yellow flowers of loofah peeking over his wooden fence. In front of this fence there is only grass. I thought of the stories of the French, how they kept the front of their houses plan and reserved the opulence for the courtyards that stretched outside the back door.

This man approached my truck after my asking could I talk to him for a minute. I said I had to stop because I knew that anybody who collected grass knew what they were doing. I told him how I had just made a video of a sugar apple. I don’t think he recognized the English so I showed him the video.

“I have this,” he said. “We have many things.”

I asked for his number and told him that I wanted to come by sometime if that was okay with him. 

“Come now,” he said. 

I got out of the truck and he led my past the door of the long wooden fence and into a yard with six 250-gallon totes tied together with PVC that collected rain water from the roof.

“We have this Vietnamese squash,” he said. “Many Vietnamese vegetables.”

“We call that one katuk,” I said.

“Rau Ngot,” he said.

“The jujubes are amazing.” And they were, two trees loaded with fruit, and the trunks as big around as the PVC.

He smiled, seemingly pleased that I knew some of what he was growing. For me, this knowledge and connection is what spans cultures, what makes the earth more than just a place where we know what we know, what makes possibilities endless.

So I woke in the morning without knowing and it wasn’t until that moment that I realized I hadn’t done what I normally do. I hadn’t asked God to surprise me. And I guess I didn’t need to.

A man I learned was his brother handed me three almost-ripe jujubes. I ate one. So crunchy. A hint of sweet. An older lady in a thin dress rounded the corner.

“My mother,” he said.

“Sin Xao,” I said.

She smiled.

“That’s how you knew how to say my name. Tan.”

I told him where I had been in Vietnam and how many things we might be able to grow that are grown over there. He led me to his sugar apple, in a big pot with seven or eight fruit and then, all the way against the house, ten or twelve foot tall, a guava loaded with fruit.

“I made mini greenhouse,” he said.

I thought of how we might work together of how there was much that he could teach me and much that I could teach him. I asked his last name to save into the phone, and he told me Dinh.

“That’s one of my favorite restaurants,” I said.

He had never heard of it. And I wondered about something I’d read, how the North and the South split where they went when arriving in New Orleans, how some went to the West Bank and some to New Orleans East. And then I thought about how I looked forward to finding out the story behind the Dinhs ending up in Arabi.