Mr Ward lived across the street
in a converted garage surrounded
by a wildly overgrown garden.
A few charred timbers lingered
under ivy that covered the
foundation of the house
where his wife had died
when the house burned down
some years before.
He never rebuilt it.
Mr Ward worked the night shift
at the Hamm’s brewery on
Bryant near Seals Stadium.
The Giants were playing there
while the new park at Candlestick
was under construction.
We could see the cranes
from the the street in front
of our house on the hill
in Brisbane.
Mr Ward would
sometimes come out
to join us, tell us stories
about people who had
lived up here on the hill.
Like the man who had lived in
the house that we now rented.
After a landslide next to the house
a riot of poison oak had erupted.
He cut it all down and burned it.
Stood close to the pyre
tending it. Breathed too much
of the smoke, which inflamed
his lungs badly.
Hospitalized,
but I don’t recall if Mr Ward said
that he died. just wanted us
to know, not to burn poison oak.
One day, as we standing
out in the street, a garter snake
crawled out onto the road.
I had never seen a real live snake
before.
It was beautiful, red and black
checkered sides, cinnamon and turquoise
around its head, a pale green stripe
down center of its back.
Mr Ward picked it up so I could
look at it. I turned to Mommy
and asked if I could keep it.
She laughed and said No,
not this one, maybe another one.
Mr Ward put the snake down
in the shrubs at the edge of his
garden and the snake quickly
disappeared. He said it guards
his yard from pests and varmints.
Later on, Mommy said Mr Ward
was a hermit. Because he lived in
that converted garage and
didn’t rebuild the house because
he wife had died in the fire.
I told her that when I grew up
I wanted to be a hermit too.
And have a wild garden with snakes
and work nights at Hamm’s
so I could play with my snakes
in the afternoon.
We moved away from Brisbane
a few months later to a brand new
subdivision in Lucas Valley.
Mr Ward gave us a Century plant,
the kind that can go decades
before itt blooms. Which it did
years later.
And I caught my first
snake there, a huge gopher snake,
long enough to wrap twice around
my waist like a belt. I brought it
to the back door. When Mom
opened the door I said, “You
promised I could keep one.”
And so I did, the first of many.