Summit Wellness: Lessons In The Garden

Lessons in the Garden - A tale of a lonely kid and his Lebanese Jiddoo 
By Marc Lee Shannon - Summit FM Wellness Contributor

During a recent Summit Staff meeting, our GM Tommy Bruno asked, let's get this thing started "Opener" question:  

“What did you call your Grandfather and Grandmother?”  

When it came to my turn, I said that I called my great parental family members Jiddoo (Lebanese for grandfather) and Situ (Grandmother). There was a laugh in the room, and the meeting went forward, but it made me think of my love for these cherished family members and how much I miss them, especially in summer as August moves in and the backyard harvest begins to be plentiful.  

Growing up, my family was not like others in the neighborhood, and summertime often found me left on my own. That usually meant wandering around, playing baseball across the street at Forest Lodge Park, or any of the activities that the city of Akron offered with its parks and recreation hubbub at the time. Those programs saved lots of lost and lonely kids like me.  

My Grandparent's big brick home at 643 Orlando Avenue was the other place I felt safe. The house with green awnings had three stories and a basement with shelves of green beans, squash, pickles, apple sauce, and tomatoes, all in neat rows of Ball™ jars with their lids tightly protecting the previous or current year's bounty. All were from my grandfather's garden in a small plot of land at the end of Hawkins Avenue that would be known as Mudrun Golf Course many years later.  

There was a clubhouse on that property at the end of a dirt drive where the other men with starched white shirts, three-day gray-bearded faces, and broken accents would congregate like priests in a private sanctuary of a church to play cards,  hoe a row of beans or cukes, and eventually tell stories of their lives before their passage to the new world, America.  I was just a fly on the wall as  I witnessed those stories, their belly laughing and the emphatic yelling as the conversations always seemed to have a "You don't tell me, I tell you" tonality.  

It was so much fun. 

I was allowed to do anything I wanted, and I would wade into the gardens with a salt shaker, pick a small tomato, and tear into the deliciousness only available when something is freshly picked. I would look up to the grape vines and the purple fruit hanging from a pergola I could not reach, toss a stone or branch to knock down a few of the forbidden sweet, sugary grapes, and then steal away like a pirate with my treasure.  

So many hours with my Jiddo were spent in those rows of love filling a basket with the bounty of the garden and then off to the A&P co-op market on Copley road to pull round back and watch my grandfather haggle with the store manager over the price of the bushel of goods. He would get back into the big Buick and laugh and laugh about how he was able to get 5 cents more per pound than the man wanted to pay, light a Lucky Stike unfiltered, and off we would go down the road as I stood on the front seat with no restaining seat belt.  

Those days and times framed moments and great memories of feeling safe, loved, and unconditionally accepted.  

My Jiddoo, Lee Shannon, was a worldly man intelligent beyond his eighth-grade education, and he would share his wisdom in those gardens or on a green and white Chase lounge chair in the garage after the day's work was done and the dinner dishes washed. The familiar and frequent mantra was about how I could consider myself lucky if I had five true friends in life while holding out his massive paw,  formed from the years of swinging steel in the N. E. Ohio factories of his youth. The accounts of his time in WWI on the Texas - Mexico border in Battery B from Summit County (one of the first cavalry units deployed)  protecting the USA from Poncho Villa and crew and the stories of his passage at age 14 crossing the Atlantic in steerage and being held in Liverpool by a man that was supposed to coordinate the journey but instead spent the money his father, (my great grandfather) had sent leaving my grandfather in a ramshackle room of a house till the US consulate got involved. Eventually, he was freed and sent on his way.  

All of these adventures were told with a cigarette in his mouth, an ear of corn being husked, or a bean snapped, and a laugh and a grin that somehow made its way into a parable of life that he would share in a way that is still indelibly inscribed in my cherished childhood memories. 

In all my years of education and learning, I am sure that the best lessons I will ever learn happened while we sat in the garage processing the day's picking of home-grown harvest: cleaning and talking, my young ears stimulated by his stories.  

Today, as I kneel in my garden watching the Roma's, the Big Boy, and the clustered Cherry tomatoes send their vines upward and out next to the magical purple Japanese Eggplant overgrown from the excess rain of the year, I can still hear his voice and see his ever-present Fedora and Keith Richards-like hanging ciggy. He is telling me that the wisdom of the garden is timeless and that I should pass this knowledge along, tell his story, and how he taught me the lessons of life on his knees, hands in the dirt, garden trowel in hand, and heart on sleeve.  

All that is missing now is this storyteller's own grandchild's voice saying, "Jiddo, tell me…. " 

Maybe someday. Maybe someday, very soon.