Pearl's Wisdom

I just took my parents to see the documentary, A Man Named Pearl because my dad has taken up gardening in his old age. In fact, he is obsessive about it, spending hours making compost and spreading it on the plants in the yard outside. For a birthday gift, I got him a grapevine, with growing grapes, turning purple as we speak. Last year I bought him two dwarf banana trees, and the year before a Meyer lemon tree. He also has a pomegranite bush, blueberries, and all the other usual garden plants, like tomatoes, peppers, parsley, mint, rosemary, etc.
The film is about a self-taught topiary artist who, at the age of over 70, I would estimate, scrambles up trees and formidable bushes of 9 feet in height as if they were the garden fence. He is a black man living in a tiny, racist South Carolina town, the child of a share-cropping family whose father went only to the third grade. Yet people come from all over the world to see his garden. I will put a photo of my favorite of his creations. It is worth going to see the film and learning more about him because his story illustrates what all of us could do if we could ignore the voices of doubters inside and outside of our own heads and do what we love.