Paying It Forward

In the RV park where we find ourselves this January, there is a man named Tim.  Friendly and outgoing, his small frame exudes an abundance of happiness in the employment position he has chosen for his later years.  He is the maintenance superintendent of the park.  He takes his job seriously, looking after the park with a passion from early in the morning, when he makes coffee for the park’s patrons, to the trailing moments of a day’s fading light.  As the sun sets over the hills rising to the west of this park, this grey bearded man in a navy blue ball cap wraps up his day with another passion - cultivating succulent plants.

Tim is a teacher, and a caretaker, specializing in the nuances of raising succulent plants.  Working with a local University, he obtains these plants when their usefulness to the students is over.  Graded on what their efforts to raise these plants has produced, the students turn their “offspring” over to Tim to carry on the effort.  This is where the real story begins.

Tim replants flats of the adopted succulents into a plethora of “pots” scoured from local flea markets and garage sales.  These pots can be anything from a coffee cup to a whimsical, ceramic caricatures of varying descriptions, or even a teapot.  Carefully drilling drainage holes into the bottom of these vessels, Tim creates the perfect new home for his succulent transplants.  Then the fun begins.
“I’m going to kidnap you,” he warns me with a mischievous grin.  “It’s okay,” he continues, “I’ve already explained my plot to your husband.”

“Well,” I think, “if my husband knows about this in advance, it must be safe.”  So I climb into Tim’s golf cart and off we drive through the RV park to a site near the park’s office.

“Pick one,” Tim offers, gesturing toward an array of succulent plants adorning the space around his travel trailer.  Potted plants are everywhere.  In the front and along the side of the trailer, plants are already re-established in pots of all descriptions.  In the rear of his RV space, are new arrivals - sitting in black, plastic, farm flats, awaiting their new homes.  “I’ll have to go to the flea market to get containers for these,” Tim explains, telling me the process he follows with the plants.  “Take one that is already transplanted!”

Making the choice is almost impossible.  “Which plant? Which pot?” I think.  They all tease me with their potential.  Finally I choose, and point to a palm tree adorned teapot harboring a succulent bearing variegated leaves in light and dark shades of green.

This will be the first and only plant in my own RV, until I can test my cat’s reaction to having living greenery in his world.  (Happily he cooperates as the days pass.  The plant is not harassed.)
Smiling, Tim lifts the pot from the ground and holds it out to me.  “Here you go.  Enjoy!”

I take it, and carefully hold my prize in my lap on the way home in his golf cart.  Along the way, Tim shares stories of others he’s “kidnapped” for this same experience.

As the days pass in the park, I observe Tim helping others.  He rescues one lady with a flat tire on her car.  He brings mulch to another couple who maintain a pristine lot, landscaped with potted, flowering shrubs near the entrance to the park.  “I’ll do anything to help them,” Tim reports, “because they keep their space so nice.”  Indeed, the entrance is incredibly inviting due to this team’s mutual, and non-required, efforts.

Tim relates how management hired him the minute they found out he was a master certified electrician.  He explains, “The part of my job I enjoy the most is training the young men who come to work with me in the park.  I ensure they progress through each new task carefully, because I want each of them to succeed.  I carefully assign jobs that will give them lifelong skills they can use anywhere.”

Tim is a man who takes what life offers, cultivating it carefully, then freely paying his experience forward to those who follow in his footsteps.  And he shares the fruits of his passion with those of us who pass briefly through his life, having no expectation other than the happiness these offerings afford him at the end of each day.  My hat is off to Tim.  The world needs more people like Tim.