The Orchid Teacher (An Update)

Back in the Time of Quarantine (TOQ), in March 2020, I wrote about the notion that Mother Nature teaches us, not vice versa. Thus, "my" orchids have taught me they bloom and blossom, live and die, in their own time, if at all. Despite my ministrations and proddings, they rebloom when they say so. (Incidentally, are we not still in the TOQ? Some are; most aren't.)

All four of "my" orchids had thus far refrained from expressing themselves via white, yellow, pink, or purple blossoms of the sort they were arrayed with when I received them. 

Fair enough. Have it your way.

I was undaunted. Correction: I was content with who and what they were. I appreciated an applauded the new green leaves that kept on sprouting from the delta of the existing foliage. I had been obeying the most common dictum of successful orchid growers: Benign Neglect. Bowing to the orchids as my teachers, I let them do what they would do, absent resentment, rancor, or expectation.

Or so I say.

Recently, one of the little plants slowly burst forth a shoot that differed from the roots that float into the air or burrow into the matrix like lazy tentacles of a small octopus. This shoot was thinner than the meandering roots and of a different shade of green, less pale. Most surprising of all, it sported buds! No question, those were buds. A half dozen nascent nodules of exuberant blossomitude. This was the secular, natural miracle I was unpraying for.

I was like a kid (secular or religious, Santa Clausified or capitalismified) the week before Christmas.

And then . . . 

And, um, then . . . 

[I can barely bring myself to admit it.]

And then, last evening, I figured I would attach the pregnant branch to the vacant and mournful solitary chopstick the plant came with, the slender sentinel that allows one to clip a branch onto it so it grows upward, according to an unspoken, if vain, aesthetic. Why not? Let's celebrate this vernal renascence with upward mobility! Who needs droopy doldrums perilously inching downward away from the mother-ship green leaves?

As I was gently and delicately trying to curl the tiny fleible clasp embracing the stalk onto the stick, it snapped. Without a sound, but palpable and visible nevertheless. I had grievously injured the vindication and triumph of my do-nothingness. (I was brought up on the Confiteor, during the recitation of which we would beat our breasts over the words "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.") The budding branch was not quite severed, but I suspect it is done for. Kaput. For good measure (really, as a quixotic gesture if ever there was one), as a palliative I curled some plastic tape around the trauma site. Perhaps it would allow some sort of mysterious recovery. This was like putting masking tape around a broken arm.  

I was so distraught I could not tell anyone until the next day, when I confessed to my beloved a "crime against Nature, possibly unforgivable."

Maybe it will survive and prevail. Most likely not. There are other fish in the sea, other orchids in the jungle, blah blah blah.

Right.

The orchid teacher is teaching me a painfully obvious lesson:

LEAVE WELL ENOUGH THE FUCK ALONE.

one door closes . . . again and again and again

Karl and I sat by the door. It was wintertime. Berlin. Several times in the past we had met at this same smoke-hazed Unter den Linden coffee shop to conduct business, interlaced with personal revelations, asides, and disclosures. What sort of business. Marketing concepts, content, mailers, brochures, slim jims, as Karl called them. But this time it was just us, discoursing discursively. No agenda. None I was aware of. True, there's always some sort of agenda, even if it is no more than get coffee, talk, drink, restroom, leave. Coffee and convo. BAM. The door slammed, sending tremors through the entranceway and derailing our verbal freight trains, barely on track in any event. How are the kids. One is in Fiji, righ-- SLAM. The door again. Maybe we should move over here. Too cramped. The back of my chair would butt against the table where Madame Defarge was knitting beside the guillotine. We needed space for some semblance of the cone of silence in case we were to drift into food porn, sedition, erudition, nihilism, co-dependency, or state secrets. Too cold to prop the door open. Don't they know this really bother-- BAM customers, at least these two customers. I mean this is bad marketing, don't you think. Curiously, some patrons would exit, we would brace ourselves and wince, and yet no crashing thud. Like some elaborate torture, we did not know when and if. How about one of those tables in back. Occupado. Do you have a sledgehammer on you. To the barista: Is there anything you can SLAM do about that door. We're aware. I know, but... Try to ignore it, just live with it. And what are your kids up to. How many grandchildren do you have. Say, do you have a question mark I can borrow. How old are-- BLAM. My brother Hans used to live what seemed like a yard from the S-Bahn train tracks on Warschauer Strasse (I wish I could make that elegant double S). The whole apartment would shimmy and rattle. It was just there. The tracks. The train ruthlessly on schedule. A trope. Background. Black noise. SLAM I thought we could do the drop here, the brush-off. Veteran spies shouldn't have to shout their secrets or write notes to each other back and forth. BAM Hand it off to me as you get cream for your coffee and as I'm returning with a croissant. Hide it in the croissant, you say. SLAM The jolt interrupts the pass-off, and I drop it on the floor, the napkin, the diagram, the schematic, the codes, stick figures, my venial sins. Out of nowhere, Mrs. (Madame to you) Defarge drops her needles and picks up une serviette d'espionage en papier. BLAM Now I get it. They knew. They knew all along. She knew, surely. The door closer, or door check, if you prefer, was removed on purpose. No one told us. No one told me. I can't answer for Karl. SLAM And Madame Defarge is out the door, the one unchecked. She's gone. Unchecked. No one stopped her. Karl, why did you ask me here. Tell me that. BLAM. Can you. SLAM.

Hamming It Up

Scene: The deli counter at Wegmans, amidst a crowd of ravenous shoppers, Sunday night. Hautboys.

I take my little numbered slip out of the dispenser. It reads "05." My number gets called.

A quarter pound of Wunderbar bologna, please.

The clerk, an elderly woman, maybe in her sixties, with short hair and almost manly features, soon hands me a plastic bag with the contents as ordered.

Anything else? she asks.

Sure, ham-off-the-bone, a third of a pound.

[We interrupt this program to declare: "Ham-off-the-bone" is not a term I will touch with a 10-foot Pole, or a 6-foot Swede. HAAHAHAHAHAHAHA.]

Honeyed? she inquires.

Um, I don't know. No. Regular (even though I don't even know what "regular" is).

A fellow employee walks up to the clerk, asking her to take something; it looks like lemon chicken; he asks her to weigh it and put a price sticker on it.

Do you mind if I do this?

No, I say, quarter truthfully but not expecting any significant delay.

The clerk goes to the opposite end. She is weighing, wrapping, weighing, wrapping, putting containers on the scale to get the tare weight. She is nodding upward to read through her bifocals. This is taking a long time. Numbers 07, 08, 09, and 10 are being called. I start to feel like an idiot and begin to fume. I begin to loathe my personally appointed sales associate serving Mr. Pawlie fecking Kokonuts himself. I consider just walking off. Screw it. Maybe come back later with, say, a lovely new number, maybe 24, Willie Mays's number.

I hold off.

She comes back to be.

Thank you so much for waiting, she says with touching earnestness.

That's all right, I lie, starting to feel like an impatient fool, but grateful I did not storm off.

Many people wouldn't be that patient. I really appreciate it, she declares.

That's okay, I say.

What did you want? she asks, almost maternally

A third of a pound of ham.

It looks as if she's a few slices off. In my impatience, I'm waving her off, as if to say, Don't bother, don't worry about it, I wanted a little more than a third of a pound anyway. But, aha! I begin to realize she is throwing those extra slices in there after everything was weighed as a gift, as a thank you for my perceived "patience."

I thank her, and continue shopping, making a note to blog about this when I get around to blogging again.

Internally, I was not at all patient.

Externally, to her, I was a paragon of patience.

Does it still count?

(It used to be a mortal sin in my conscience, even if I thought the impure thought.)

Incidentally, my knowledge of Latin from back in high school, from my seminary days, tells me patience comes from the Latin word meaning "to suffer," "to endure."

I guess impatience can be a sort of albatross.

Incidentally once again, The Online Etymology Dictionary is a great resource. I recommend it; the site offers opportunities to sponsor words, teasing readers to send someone lust.

Intriguing.

(Disclaimer: No actual meat was consumed in the typing of this post.)