A New Year (or Tangy Titties)

The sun was sheeny past the windows that looked out over Judy and Carlisle’s backyard. The expansive view provided a glimpse of the backyards of at least four Victorians, each a different vibrant hue and picturesque with the clear blue sky behind them. “You’re not done with the tour yet,” Carlisle called out in his thick Southern accent as his shoes thumped on the wooden stairwell that led to the back.

With his gray Fedora hat a la Tom Landry perched on my noggin’, I stopped my petting and cooing of Rosie the pug and stood up from the rug. I stepped out into the sun and descended the steps that ran alongside an orange tree. Past the tree was a tiny fenced off area that appeared to be a forgotten garden, the leaves of some plants sagging and frayed at the ends, small red-orange tomatoes rotting on the lush soil.

Carlisle stood in the middle of the concrete patio beneath the tree. He grinned and held his arms out.

“Not bad, huh?” he asked as we peered up at the tree, its oranges and foliage glimmering in the sunlight.

“I’m gonna have to come out here when I’m high!” I replied.

“It gets better. Check this out,” he said before turning to open a door which led into a low-hanging garage, beneath his new home.

A fluorescent light flicked to life as I followed him in. He walked off to a corner and marched back, his head bent, with a five-foot long pole in hand. At one end was a cone-sized basket of sorts with what looked like a miniature rake protruding out on one side.

We stepped back into the warm blanket of sun as Carlisle turned a knob on the pole to extend it. With both hands firmly grasping it, he tilted it to the heavens. My jaw hung open in wonder as he negotiated an orange within the basket, then reared back to use the rake-part to pull the orange off its branch.

“And there you have an orange,” Carlisle said as he brought the pole down to ground level and allowed the fruit to roll off and onto the pavement. “Normally, you’d have another person on that end, grabbing them, putting them in a basket to speed the picking process.”

“That’s cool, man. What is that thing called?”

“A harvester,” he replied as he set it back against the house.

He walked back beneath the tree, plucked an orange from it and bent over to pick up the one from the ground. He handed them to me and picked one for himself.

We took a step to look out over the garden as Rosie descended the stairs. She took a rest at the bottom, licking her snout and staring at us in a lazy Sunday way. Carlisle told me that he wanted to eventually knock the elfin fence (it was about three feet high) so he wouldn’t feel so separate from it. For the time being, until he and Judy figured out what they were going to do with the space, they were keeping the gate that led out into the garden shut because Rosie would eat those rotting tomatoes. I chuckled since I remembered how fond she was of eating any crap we crossed on the sidewalks of the Mission, whenever I took her for a stroll.

We conversed about school, about how he wanted to cut back on his class load to have “more of a life” in the coming semester. I yacked about how I was trying to make the best of my vacation from classes by giving myself strict deadlines on finishing the books I was reading. While we spoke, Carlisle started to toss and catch his orange over his shoulders like a sideshow clown, his lips puckered and blue eyes bulging goofily. The juggle itch sifted into me and I started to chuck my oranges up in the air. A carnival tune began to toot in my brain. I couldn’t do anything nifty like Carlisle so in a move that recalled my pubescent years, I slipped one then both oranges underneath my Simpsons shirt to create pointy breasts which I would later dub "tangy titties". After I nestled them around for symmetricality, I turned to look up at Carlisle.

“Can you tell I’m sexually frustrated?” I quipped before we started laughing, the giddy sun and blue sky bereft of worry clouds getting to us.