Value

Ron Finley asked us, “What’s the most important thing in your life?” A faculty member from Tulane said her grandmother. A student said, “My education.” 

Ron asked Evan directly.

“Air,” he said.

“Exactly. Sometimes it takes five or six people. Sometime nobody gets it. Sometimes people will argue and say water and I say, ‘You know what the O stands for in H2O?’”

He started his talk slow, a google slides show along with some notes that he had written about each slide. He held the microphone away from his center so that I could not always hear what he said. He did speak about how he realized recently that if he doesn’t like something, he’s going to change it. That’s what he did when the city of Los Angeles fined him for growing food in the space between sidewalk and street.

He really got going when he spoke of his own experience.

He said he couldn’t read as a kid and later learned he had dyslexia. He said that he would walk by the Home Ec. classroom and smell the cakes and so one day he asked the teacher could he join the class. She told him the class was for girls.

He said, “But aren’t most chefs men?”

She thought about this and later that year added a class for boys.

He asked us an important question. “How do you make growing sexy? How do you give it value? How to you get the kids to give this as much value as they give the new Iphone?”

We have been given a bill for false goods. He noted diamonds. Rocks from the ground. How some people assigned value to these rocks you cannot eat, these rocks that cannot be used for much more than the shine and the reputation they give.

I keep thinking of the story of the nose cutters, of how one man had his nose cut off for stealing in India. He immediately said, “I see God.”

People were amazed. Some really believed him. Two believed him so much they let him cut off their noses. But they did not see God.

“You’ll look pretty foolish if you tell people you cut off your nose and can’t even see God.”

So there were three. And it went on like this until a merry band of thousands ended up in another kingdom.

Maybe this is what happens with diamonds. Maybe this is what happens with God. Deep inside there are times when we are not sure, but everybody else seems so sure and what might we look like were we not to have these things?

I wanted to ask him about how best to make money from growing while navigating a system that does not seem to support those who know how to grow on a small level. I told him my experience with the schools.

“They’re like that,” he said. “They want to find people they don’t have to pay. Each school should have at least one full time gardener. With a salary. But most don’t.”

I asked him how I might go forward. I told him how I taught the kids that were like him in school. He said he was good with his hands. He wanted to be a tailor as a teenager. I told him about how some of the kids that acted out because they couldn’t learn were the best workers in the garden. He said he knew.

“They want to standardize the children,” he said. “Not all kids learn the same way.”

He said that you have to help them see the value in this, how a pile of leaves can become compost. How worm compost goes for five or six bucks a pound. I told him mulberries can fetch 14 bucks a quart. I didn’t tell him how I'd like to see fruit trees everywhere and kids harvesting this. 

I’m not sure exactly what God is. I know that God deals in love and abundance. I know God speaks in silence. I know sometimes I want answers right away.

I noticed Ron Finley had some bracelets on his right wrist. I took off one of the ones I had made. There were other people waiting to talk to him. One student said she watched his video with her class in elementary school and that same school recently got a twenty thousand dollar grant. I didn’t want to think past the fact that he changed the life of that girl he had never met. This happens. We don’t always know the ripple of a rock we have thrown.

I said, “Ron, I make these.” I handed him my bracelet. “They’re from Job’s tears that I grew.”

“I don’t know if it will fit my big wrist.”

“Give it to somebody else if it doesn’t,” I said. “Please.”

He shook my hand. I would like to see him again.