The Greenhouse Odyssey: Ten-Some of the Sum
By Lorraine Miller
I’m dizzy. Am I in a fine kettle of fish or am I lapping up caviar?
For my own clarity, let me take stock. I own 1 ½ properties: the ‘little house’ with one freestanding cactus greenhouse in the back and the backyard of Erikson’s property with two connected foliage greenhouses. I have zero parking and one billboard. I’m still wholesaling to other garden centers and stores. I have a growing number of ‘walk-in’ customers and the interior plant maintenance business is growing lickety-split. A semi of houseplants comes from Florida every six weeks and another truck from California comes in between. Oh yeah, I have a mortgage on the ‘little house’ and I’m still making payments to Elaine and Jack.
I have more employees; around a dozen. They are all characters.
Miriam was still there and still ruling the roost.
Kevin is still there and still making Miriam crazy. Three or four people work in the greenhouses, loading and unloading trucks, watering, pulling orders and installing new plant maintenance accounts. There are three interior plant technicians and a couple of delivery drivers. My best friend from high school is the bookkeeper and the person who answers the phone. Her desk was in my dining room.
Although each one had a loose job description, each one had their own skills and talents, too. I encouraged them to use those talents because we were constantly trying to improve and meet new challenges. We needed every skill we could get.
With gratitude for the irony of life, a young woman applied who was an attorney for city government. She explained her need to get away from the bureaucracy. I could see the desperation in her eyes. There’s no doubt that working in the greenhouse is therapeutic, both physically and mentally. She took to it like a tadpole in a water pocket. Once she settled in, she saw the need and wrote Cactus & Tropicals’ Interior Plant Maintenance Contract, our pesticide policy handbook, an employee handbook and forms. Forms, forms, forms. Tasks that were way too bureaucratic for me.
Midway through the five-year plan with the Ericksons, confessed they were ready to retire. Frank didn’t want to paint in the chinchilla shed any longer and she didn’t want to sit in the gallery every day. I understood their sudden desire to leave ahead of schedule. Sometimes, when we see something coming over the horizon, something we really want, it’s hard to wait. We run to it. Gloria asked if I wanted to rent the gallery until the second part of our contract kicked in and the balloon payment became due.
I’m queasy and a little scared. When eminent domain closed the Grass Menagerie, I had only myself to worry about. This is different. This is bigger.
Now I have commitments and responsibilities. I have people dependent on me for their livelihood. I have obligations to my suppliers and customers. I have debt, and debt adds gnawing pressure. I can’t fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants anymore. Is it possible a brain like mine, as flighty as a bluebird in spring, could actually envision and write a business plan? I am sobered, more serious. My sense of humor is endangered. Not sure what to do, I asked my business. “I’m all ears, Cactus & Tropicals. Speak to me.”
“Take the offer, Lorraine. Take the offer.”
“Who’s there?” I asked, searching the deep blue sky.
“You need the parking. Take the offer.”
“I can’t. I’m afraid. I didn’t say my affirmations this morning.” I squeaked.
“Aren’t you the one who coined the phrase ‘always do today what you were going to do tomorrow? How about ‘do this year what you were going to do in three years?’
It did fit my M.O., thinking with my gut and more or less using my head as a battering ram.
“Okay. I’ll do it!”
How can I rent the gallery? Few will remember the beginning days of the Triad Center and the Khashoggi kerfuffle in downtown Salt Lake City. That’s a Google search for the curious. But originally, it had several retail stores, with promises of more to come. ‘More’ never materialized and instead, shops were fleeing. As fate would have it, I had three friends who were partners in a business there called the Southwest Shop. They were looking for a place to relocate, too. Our stars aligned.
I joined them as a fourth partner in the Southwest Shop and they moved into Phranques Gallery. My new partners were amazingly talented and enterprising. The outside of the gallery was painted Santa Fe pink, and the window frames were periwinkle blue. The front porch and entry were covered with a small ramada of rough sawn pine. You wouldn’t believe it was the same building! The inventory was unique to Salt Lake. Southwest style was a craze and we did pretty well. The Southwest Shop paid rent to Cactus & Tropicals and Cactus & Tropicals paid rent to the Ericksons. It was a little maelstrom of money and everyone’s problem was solved.
Thus, we rolled.
Some problems were more difficult than others. When I gave the Ericksons the down payment in 1983, she gave me a copy of the contract with Reagan Billboard Company. It was a ten-year contract signed in 1977. She encouraged me to notify them in 1986 that the gig was up. The contract itself looked like it had been printed on a hand-crank mimeograph machine. It was legal-size paper and dense with 8 pt. type, but the dates were filled in by hand. The line read, “This is a ten-year contract beginning January 1st of 1977 and ending January 1st of 1987.” It even had a kindly note handwritten in the margin, promising to plant and prune the shrubs around the billboard.
When the time came, I called the billboard company.
“No,” they said. “The billboard stays. It has ten more years. You didn’t read the small print in the last paragraph.”
The Ericksons missed it, I missed it and an attorney missed it. I scrutinized the document with more care and found the phrase, not even a complete sentence, that read ‘and therefore, for a like successive period thereafter.’ Ten more years!
I sued with the help of another attorney. She had a good case.
In challenging the legality of the contract, she used the terms ‘unconscionable’ (meaning not right or reasonable) and ‘illusory’ (meaning based on illusion), or what I call a sneaky trick. The Judge agreed the phrase ‘and therefore, for a like successive period,’ in tiny type and buried in the body of the final paragraph was a little slippery, although I don’t think he used that term. Still, he ruled against me, decreeing that a contract is a contract and the signatory should be wise enough to understand what they were signing.
I was so full of mad! That billboard was an albatross around my neck for ten more years. When I finally put in parking, the billboard took up the middle of the lot, challenging any driver to knock it down. It was a nightmare, a constant fender-bender and an infringement on private property. A guy came with a crane every few months to change the paper sign and when he came, I turned into a ferocious toy poodle with a spiked collar. I never let go of his pant cuffs. If he came during business hours, I barked him out of the lot. If he dropped chunks of paper on the ground, I yapped viciously and threatened him with the EPA and the Garbage Workers Union.