I got my first paycheck just as March rolled in, and the snow was finally starting to melt.

It was $127.97.

After I gave Mum the $50 I'd promised myself I'd give her, I had just enough left for everything I needed to plant my tree. I had done copious amounts of research to find the most manly and hard to plant tree. It had to be something that required tonnes of work to plant, and that grew to several hundreds of feet tall. Survival in our weird northern climate also had to be considered. Viktor had suggested that the manliest way to plant a tree would be to eat a pine cone, dig a hole in the woods, crap out the pine nuts into the hole, cover up the crap pile, and then piss on the dirt mound to water the crap pile underneath.

I told him to go to hell with his pine cone.

I wasn't about to cut up my insides eating pine cones. I also didn't think it was very environmentally friendly to go crapping in the woods. I read an article about human poo, and how it was the most toxic poo of the animal kingdom. The garbage that humans ate was turning it into this hazardous sludge.

I didn't feel very good about leaving that sort of poison leaching into the soil. No, I was going to plant it in the manliest, cleanest and non-pine-cone-eating way possible. I had my limits. My dad never ate a pine cone. He ate a playing card once when he lost a hand of poker, but he never ate a pine cone. I was going to go the old-fashioned green thumb route, and get all the proper gardening materials I needed, but with manly twists on everything.

The only unmanly thing about the whole endeavour was when I had to ask my mum for a ride to the gardening store. We went to the biggest gardening store in town, which was stupidly named Plants 'n Such, with the ridiculous 'n that had been in popular use since rock 'n roll had brought it into favour back in the 50s.

Salt 'n vinegar was another poor, albeit delicious, example of the 'n phenomenon.

I was bamboozled by Plants 'n Such. There was just so much to see and smell. That was the thing I remembered most about Plants 'n Such for years afterwards; the incredibly potent and overwhelming smell. It was a mixture of dirt, manure, and leaves.

I liked it. It smelled really good.

"Like a man should smell," I said. "Mum, I'll be quick. You go do whatever it is you need to do, and we'll meet back at the cash register in ten minutes."

I set off in search of my man seeds without waiting for her reply. I mulled over exactly what I meant by man seeds, and decided to use that term less frequently. I didn't get a shopping basket, because men that went into stores for just a few items and grabbed a basket to carry everything weren't that manly. Men didn't need baskets for small trips.

I had first researched the giant sequoia, because I had heard once upon a time that the giant sequoia was the biggest plant in the world. 99 % of the time biggest meant manliest, unless of course you were dealing with cell phones. Then, smallest was the very manliest. How it was okay for cell phones to be stupid tiny and everything else had to be hulking, I'd never know.

It turned out the sequoia wasn't well-suited to our cooler climes. There was, however, a suitable candidate very close to home. I was going to plant the biggest, single most impressive tree in the whole world. It would live for a thousand years in our climate, and might help the other plants around it. I was going to plant a Douglas Fir Tree. It always blew my mind to think that some trees had been growing since the Middle Ages, stretching for the heavens while kings and queens were deposed, dropping cones while Joan of Arc heard the voice of God tell her to fight for her king and country. The trees had been there, climbing skyward at the rate of 2-3 centimetres a year. I had really done my homework on this one. I was quite proud of the amount of work I'd done. My tree was going to be just fine.

The only part of Viktor's cone plan that I was actually going to follow was the part where I used a real cone fresh from nature, as opposed to buying the seeds. I already had my cone, and it was in my pocket. I figured I might as well connect with the little guy before I shoved him into the earth.

I needed potting soil, fertilizer, and some tools. My mum didn't have any tools. I was going to give her the tools I bought once I was done my job. The first stop was the potting soil. They had two bag sizes: five pounds and ten pounds. I grabbed a 10 pound bag of it, and hoped it would be enough. I hoisted the bag over my shoulder and kept going. The tools were next. I wanted a rake and a shovel. That was it. The rake was for keeping the area around my cone clean, and the shovel was for doing exactly what you do with a shovel. Viktor had suggested gloves in case I got dirty, and I had given him a scathing look. Dirty was something men didn't mind. We got dirty and we loved it. The rakes and shovels were right beside each other, in two giant crates filled with rakes and shovels of various shapes, sizes and colours. I got an all black shovel and an all black rake. The soil was still up on my left shoulder, so I balanced out the system with the shovel and rake in the other hand. Almost done. All I needed now was my big old bag of stinky fertilizer. The fertilizer aisle was a sensory feast of epic proportions. The bouquet of aggressively coloured bags hurt my eyes, and the potpourri of smells, stinks, and stenches that wafted up my nostrils and out through my fingers made me stagger. I nearly dropped my soil and tools as I swooned.

Mushroom fertilizer, cow fertilizer, horse fertilizer, organically composted ground beef fertilizer, and just about any other kind of thing that rots had been turned into some form of fertilizer by the gardening corporations of the world. I was starting to sweat under the ten pounds of soil, and the infusion of decomposing matter up my nostrils was not helping matters.

This would have to be quick.

A garden store worker in a red vest appeared at the far end of the aisle. She was a short, heavy-set woman whose boobs were about as big as her head. Her bum was all weird-shaped, and made a shelf on her back side that you could put stuff on if you were in a pinch. I wondered if she'd realized that and had tried it, because I would have. If I'd had a weird shelf ass, I would have totally tried to put stuff on it.

I gave her my best 'can you help me' look, but she returned with her best 'I don't understand your look on purpose, I'll continue working on my stupid checklist that doesn't actually mean anything to the store, but it makes them feel like I'm doing something worthwhile' look.

I was going to have to bellow. My mother hated it when I bellowed, just as much as she'd hated it when Dad bellowed. As far as I could tell, men bellowed. I was surprised Hemingway hadn't mentioned anything about bellowing in his list.

"Excuse me!" I called.

The worker slowly turned to face me, and looked at me with raised eyebrows, like this was the first time she'd been aware of me.

"Can you help me please?"

A moment of irritation flashed across her face, just enough to display her true feelings. She covered it up quickly with her customer service smile, which revealed no teeth but made her look 10 IQ points more dumb. I stood by the main cluster of fertilizer offerings and waited as she waddled over to me. Her name was Wanda, and she smelled of clothes that hadn't been washed for a couple of months. There were some guys at work that left their uniforms in their lockers after every shift, and they were starting to smell the same way Wanda did. They actually smelled a little worse, because they had the added stink of old food mixed in with their stale B.O.

Jodi and I called the smell 'bo-bos', and whenever either one of those guys was working, Jodi and I would be in stitches over our 'bo-bos' jokes.

"What seems to be the problem?" she asked. Her voice was high-pitched, with a slight break near the top that made her sound like a thirteen year old boy.

I noticed she didn't call me sir.

As I got older, more and more adults called me sir. There were several still, though, that refused to call me sir, because they saw me as a punk kid. I wasn't about to launch into my life-changing plan with Wanda, and how I was going to be more sir than she'd ever seen in less than a year.

"The problem is that you guys have about five billion kinds of fertilizer," I said. "I just need to know which one is good for trees."

Her customer service smile dropped so fast I looked for it on the floor.

"Trees?" she asked.

"Yeah. Trees."

"What kind of tree?"

"Douglas Fir."

"People don't usually just plant Douglas Fir trees. Maybe you want to start with something smaller, like a cactus or a potato."

"A potato? What the hell is wrong with you? Why would I want to plant a potato? Where's the challenge in a potato? No, thank you, Wanda, I don't want to start with a cactus or a potato. I would just like to know what kind of fertilizer works best for trees."

"For Douglas Fir trees."

"Yes. For Douglas Fir trees."

Wanda's face was passive. I had no idea what was going on behind those milky grey eyes. My shoulder ached. I was nearly ready to shriek for my mum. Who cared if I was manly when I bought my gardening supplies, really? Who would even know?

No, I had to stay strong.

Dad would have stuck it out with Wanda, but Dad might have also made his own fertilizer by eating too much bran and drinking some prune juice.

"Why Douglas Fir trees?" asked Wanda.

"Because then I can say that it's my Douglas Fir tree. Isn't that much more impressive than 'my potato' or 'my cactus'? I can go out to my backyard in ten years and say 'that's my Douglas Fir tree.' I like the sound of that. Can you help me or no?"

Wanda smiled a more genuine smile. Her teeth were showing this time, and judging from the number of gaps showing, Plants 'n Such didn't offer a very good dental plan. It didn't matter. She lit up with her real smile.

""You're weird, kid," she said. "But I like that. Take this one. That'll help you with your Douglas Fir tree."

She picked up a plain yellow bag that simply had 'Pure Cow Manure' stamped across the front. It smelled awful, but felt just right. She handed it out to me, and after a couple of awkward attempts of getting me to hold it on my free shoulder, offered to carry it up to the front for me. I grudgingly accepted the help, because if a man couldn't ask for help to carry his crap, then what could he ask for?

Wanda led me to checkout three, the express lane. I couldn't imagine how many items anyone could ever possibly need to purchase at the gardening store where they would need to go to a lane other than the express lane. Unless they were starting a whole new garden and were buying some huge amount of seeds and tools and everything else they had to offer, I thought the express lane would more than satisfy most people. I wondered what kind of person would come in and buy out half the gardening store.

Wanda, probably.

I put my dirt bag down, and then dropped my rake and shovel on the conveyor belt. Wanda added my manure and went back to her checklist. Mr. Shaw sometimes did checklists at Plumpy's, and always looked miffed as he was doing them. They were often for ordering more food or figuring out if everyone was wearing the right uniform. Mr. Shaw didn't seem like the kind of guy that really got a kick out of doing that sort of thing. He usually got Jodi to do them.

I guessed that was why most people had kids: to make them do the jobs that they didn't really want to do.

The cashier rang my stuff through. His name was Clarence and his face was too small for his head. His eyes were all pinched together, and he had a mouth that looked like an anus. It was all puckered and looked like nothing could get in or out. His ears stuck way out, and his hair needed a good washing. My total came to $73.57. The rake was the most expensive item. The manure and the dirt only came to about ten bucks. I handed Clarence the cash and he gave me my change with his greasy hands.

"Thank you for shopping at Plants 'n Such," he said in a deep frog voice.

I hauled my gardening supplies out to the car where my mum was waiting. Her distracted brain had once again made her forget where we'd agreed to meet, so she'd just headed to the car and waited to be safe. At least she wasn't completely abandoning her responsibility.

I opened the trunk and threw the stuff inside. I walked around to the driver's side window and motioned for Mum to open the window.

"Can I drive?" I asked once she'd rolled the window down.

"Why not?" she replied.

She unbuckled her seat belt and shifted over to the passenger seat without leaving the car. I was still on my learner's permit, so I had to get some ridiculous number of driving hours before I could even take the driving test. I had been going really strong before Dad died, but like everything else the driving had gone by the wayside that day.

"What are you planning on doing with all that stuff?' Mum asked.

"Become a man," I said without hesitation.

"You become a man by starting a garden?"

"Not exactly."

She looked at me as if she wanted to ask more questions, but relaxed as if she didn't really think she wanted to know the answer.

"Just let me know if you need any help," she said.

It was nice to hear.

I only saw my father cry twice.

Twice in sixteen years.

He nearly took off his own head with an axe, he had debilitating arthritis, he'd had four other children after me, so it wasn't like he hadn't had ample opportunity.

I only saw tears leak from his eyes on two separate occasions.

The occasions couldn't have been much more different.

One of the times was a surprise. I came home from school and found him crying in the kitchen, all by himself. He was nursing a glass of his favourite drink, scotch and water. 

"What's wrong?" I asked.

He said nothing.

I said nothing. 

He blew his nose. It was much louder than his crying. It broke a barrier. The expulsion of air from the human body, whatever or wherever the air may be, was nature's way of getting us over ourselves. He laughed, then we laughed together.

He missed his dad.

His dad had died years and years before. I' d never asked him about it. He had only been 14 when his dad died. Grandpa had died in my dad's arms. Dad laughed and cried again. 

I'd never known that his dad died in his arms.

That would definitely stick with you. 

The second time was silly by comparison, but had happened a few years earlier. My younger brain had treated it with all the seriousness a tiny mind can. We had been watching a movie; Dances With Wolves. It was really long, but I'd liked it. The other kids were all asleep. It was right near the end, when Wind in his Hair kicks up the horse's legs as Kevin Costner leaves the village. I looked over at my dad right then, and he was weeping uncontrollably. He caught me looking and gave me a glare to turn me around.

Two times.

But he'd done it. I knew that it could happen. Thank God.