The Orchid Teacher

No, no, no, not someone to teach the arts of nurturing orchids. No, no. The orchid is the teacher. She gives the lessons. He tells the tale. It sends the message. The orchid. It's the seer, guru, professor, maestro.

The orchid's the teacher.

The blossoms wilted. They died. They fell. The big green leaves stayed around all winter after the flower spikes were cut down near the bottom. Watered once a week in the time of hibernation, a time before The Quarantines. Faithfully. Months passed. And in the spring two, possibly three or four, minuscule shoots, bright dots, green-yellow eyes peering from the sphagnum. It is said these are flower spikes. Nascent. 

Hope. After the endless winter.

Hope was not abandoned, all ye who entered here.

Hope in the Age of Coronavirus.

I am the orchid.

You are the orchid.

No human heart or voice ever scolded the orchid, never inserted a sideways "should" in any shape, color, or form. Never remonstrated the orchid for its tardiness, its barrenness, its playing dead. No human name murmured "what if" or "if only you had" or "but." The orchid wouldn't listen anyway. She knew her secrets, he guarded his destiny, it surrendered to its fate. The orchid endured not a single "told you so" or "could have" or "would have."

Her patience with our impatience was our homework, quiz, and test. Everyone passed. His lesson was for all to see all along. Speaking not a word, the orchid spoke volumes.

You are the orchid.

I am the orchid.

We sing hymns to the orchid teacher. The orchid is the teacher, we the pupils.

The orchid is the message and the messenger.
 

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.

All Choked Up

The blog post preceding this one almost proved to be my last, forever. Amen.

Unless blogging is permitted or encouraged on The Other Side.

(And what do bloggers do about such matters? Do they stipulate in their will: "Hidden in the L volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica you will find my Blogger username and password. Post the following valedictory message. . . ."?)

Last Monday evening, before eating, I had mowed the back lawn. (Cf. my poem "Mowing the Last Lawn," previously and aptly posted on this blog.)

We were in the midst of having some roast pork from the grill, potato salad, and broccoli when my son E. and his wife J. popped over to give my wife a Mother's Day gift of an orchid and a card. Filial pleasantries were exchanged, and then they were off to see "Star Trek." I returned to my mostly-finished meal. Upon reaching the hallowed space of the dinner table, I noticed that my wife, B., had turned on the televised national news (thinking, I later learned, that our meal was done, over, complete). This is an ongoing tug-of-war. I strongly feel that having the television on at this time is vulgar, that it thwarts any chance of familial discourse, whether that discourse is contrary and sullen or bright and airy or silent or raucous. She strongly feels otherwise, wanting to learn about the day's sordid events via something called "the news" ("there's the Internet 24/7, I protest), relishing the electronic medium as a facilitator in the lost art of conversation, or perhaps welcoming the brash way it fills up the empty spaces between what settles for dialogue. In silent protest, I left the kitchen table with plate in hand, almost as a second thought grabbing a lonely chunk of grilled meat, leaving daughter A. and wife B. with the TV on and me gone. I paraded upstairs to my office, where I now sit. I marched with my plate in hand and a piece of meat shoved by my other hand into my mouth. As I was walking upstairs, I detected a sponginess in my chewing. This wasn't going right. Or was it? Try chewing a little more. Well, I can't chew anymore, now, can I? Don't panic. It'll sort itself out. Or will it? By the time I was upstairs, I knew the food had slid down and had managed to get stuck in my throat or somewhere along its preordained path. I couldn't breathe. I was getting dizzy. I was scared. I knew I had to get downstairs, which I managed to do, staggeringly, Frankenstein-like, plate in hand. I did hear something like a silent inner voice say something like, "Well, maybe this is it. It's that simple and ordinary." I got to the dining room near the doorway to the kitchen, and collapsed onto the floor, making frothy sounds, turning, I've been told, bluish gray. B. said, "Are you choking?" "I managed to nod yes. "Daddy! Daddy!" A. screamed in a voice neither one of us, or B., is likely to forget. "Mommy, should I call 911?" "Yes." B. somehow lifted me up and began to perform the Heimlich. She is a nurse. I could hear A. talking to the 911 folks. I could hear her give my age as 56 (yay! I am really 60) and calmly relay answers to their questions. I had not lost all consciousness, although things were getting blurrier and for all I know I'm making all this up and remember this in some fantasy-fractured manner. But A. kept yelling, "Daddy! Daddy!" didn't she? A cry of fierce determination, fear, and love. B. repeatedly administered the Heimlich Maneuver frantically and vigorously (also with fierce determination, fear, and love), but it was not working. There goes that little voice of Sayonara whispering to me again. It wasn't working. For some moments I did think, well, I guess this is it with uppercase i and t underscore bold italic. "Stop fighting me. Relax," my wife yelled, getting more and more frustrated and terrified. Although I found, like the drowning man, it was hard to relax (relax? I'm dying here, like a bad Catskills comedian!), I must have done so even a little because I drew a breath. I had no sensation of having drawn a breath, but something had changed. Something Happened, as Joseph Heller put it in the title of his post-Catch-22 novel. The blurriness began to recede. I could hear better. The pork went who knows where, but not outward. I collapsed onto a chair, exhausted. Were we crying? Or was it later? Or not at all? "Thank you. Thank you. I'm sorry I scared you. I'm sorry. Thanks. You both did a great job. I didn't mean to scare you. I'm sorry I scared you." My voice was hoarse, soft, defeated. The medics got here. My vitals were okay. A. was still frightened out of her 12-year-old skull and escaped to friends across the street, beside herself.

A friend asked if I saw a white light or anything like that.

Yeah. In the kitchen.

We now return to our irregularly written and read weblog.

fiery words

With large loft windows facing west, the afternoon-into-evening sun, wintry rare in these climes, blares. All but shouts. A clarion charge of lambent light, never failing to lift the indoor temps a degree or two. Healthy for the orchid, bonsai ficus, and cacti on the kitchen-dining room peninsular counter, beside the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, volume 1 of 2, open to the C's, the handy reader's magnifying glass resting on the cleavage of open pages. Sprawled on the couch, I am reading The New Yorker, on the cusp of a nap, hindered by the lambent intrusion; too drowsy to get up and pull the blinds down. Eyelids fluttering, flickering: the first frames of a silent movie. Sparrows, crows across the street, distantly bickering. Alone in the hull of a huge ship, flooding, like the Titanic but battleship steel, and yet the aristocratic balustrades and chandeliers of opulence. That dream again. No one but me. The Atlantic cascading down the stairs. My shouts, my cries. To whom? To what? My chattering teeth. The molten ice enveloping my veins. Please. Can you hear me? Can someone hear me? I can't swim. Too late. Sinking. No one. What is that? What. Where. What. Wisp of warmth. Dust. Rescue? Smoke? Attempt to scroll eyelids up. Turn head left, right. Scroll up. Eyes cloudy. Force open, wide-eyed. Wisps of white floating from the open OED. Vatican puffs of papal decision. Jolt. I jump. Dart to the counter. First tongues of flame. Memories of tissue paper, August heat, Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass in the backyard. Presto, no matches. Boyish danger. The word, you ask. Which word? Chagrin. The noun. Then the verb. Chagrin.