PROPOGATION, PT. 3
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| [Pressed flowers from Point Lookout, Maryland, adhered to carte de visite mount] c. 1863-1985. |
Charlie had always held a personal notion of God. As a child, with an unexplained picture Bible in his toy chest, he had stared for long hours upon images of a fallen giant, a prodigal son, and his favorite—a feisty Jesus overturning merchant’s tables in the temple, sending tidy stacks of coins flying through the air. He liked the stories but had trouble with some of the bigger ideas. The Holy Trinity confounded him—how one thing could be something else, and again something else. He was also confused by the active and talky God who seemed now so suspiciously absent. What had happened to the flashy theatre of God? The angels and flames, those godly tests and threats? Where did that God go?
His love of plants began when he was six. At the breakfast table he had dissected a French tulip for no reason at all, plucking each petal, each dusty stamen, and then smashing, but gently, the ovary, inspecting its waxy machinery. When his mother saw him and her ruined purchase she had yelled and scolded, only to see in her son’s face, becoming hot with tears, that first shame of curiosity. She did not apologize, yet the next time she went to the shop she bought an extra orchid bouquet for Charlie to do with what he pleased. What he did was tear it apart, meticulously, obsessively, and draw pictures of each blossom’s many tiny pieces.
There was something about the flower’s construction—simple but complicated, inert but irrefutably alive—that seemed to answer, in some way, Charlie’s silent boyhood question: not the why, but rather the how of God. If he was to have a God it would not be the interventionist, the father/punisher, not the master showman in his crude picture book. His God would be a lowercase god: silent, mechanical, detached, made of and in the hidden potential of a seed.
By age ten he knew the names of the flower’s many parts and their functions. By fourteen he had flower boxes on every edge of the back porch railing. By eighteen he was enrolled in a botany degree, then a horticultural sciences program. And after that, until last month, he had been working for the small city Botanical Center—a stately old cluster of glass domes, whose mission was one of companionship with nature, of understanding the basic bond between the kingdom Plantae and mankind. It was a mission he could abide by, yet the informational plaques in the various rooms—“Rainforests” one read happily, “The lungs of the Earth!”—struck Charlie as reductive, faulty. Really, Charlie had little interest in informing the public. He wanted only to be witness to the lives of plants, to commune as much as he could with their perfect being: to be free of ego, of want, of myth.
The reasons for his being fired were not surprising. Their budget, all parks department cash and donor funds, had recently become a fickle, uncertain thing. He was one of two young horticulturalists in a place that needed only one. He was given a helpful severance package; he would have excellent references. Even right after it happened, having lived in that anxious public-sector world, he felt a small relief.
Yet there was grief there too. Those cloistered botanist co-workers that he would rarely, if ever, see again. The spaces and corridors of that beautiful old building he was no longer allowed. All the unspecified, almost unconscious hopes he had fostered in that job, made glaring in their sudden impossibility: that maybe he would be General Foreman someday, or Director; maybe he would open a bog wing in the fern room, start an orchid festival in the seasonal wing; maybe he would start a botanist youth program, maybe interject a little of his own philosophy into the curriculum—“Rainforests: Maybe They Want Us Dead!” They were outlandish goals, belonging to someone more civically minded than he. Still, they gave him a quiet comfort.
And then there was the actual work: the three banana plants he had been attending to whose womanly inflorescence had just opened over the summer, his favorite frizzy Cyprus Papyrus group he had communally named Glinda, the enormous Mexican Agave Century Plant whose deathly flowering stage Charlie and his co-workers had celebrated like the birth of a child. So many smaller losses wrapped up in that one, like losing a key to the room that stored all his favorite things. Alone each thought was commonplace and easily forgotten, but all together and gone all at once, Charlie felt empty, depleted, a stranger to himself.
The day after being fired, while sorting through his work files, he found a copy of the conservatory mailing list and, feeling dramatic, mailed a pressed violet blossom to people on the list with unfortunate names: Gabby Hacker, B.D. Fusmugger, Schlomo Plotsko. They all got a flower. The next day he started giving things up. The next day he started calling his sister.
“What would you do if you had a million dollars?” he had asked her that first time. “I mean seriously, what would you do?”
She sighed, thought about it. “I guess I’d pay for the rest of school, pay off my student loans. I want a house. Sam was saying it’s a good time to buy a house.”
“Really?” He was disappointed.
“Jesus Charlie. Just tell me what you would do. That’s why you asked isn’t, to say whatever the fuck you wanted to say?”
“Well, yes,” Charlie said, unmoved, “I have been thinking about it and I’ve decided I would buy as much land as I could and plant it. I would plant it and let it grow, totally unkempt, just wild. I would buy a city block and let it fall apart, let the vegetation take over. Let the trees blast through the rooftops and the vines cover the buildings. It’d be a kind of natural art installation. Then I would walk, I would live out of a backpack, and just plant trees on any unclaimed patch of land. You know, you can tell a history by the size and shape of the trees. You can tell a story by the vegetation.
I would like to create a new blip in time, a million trees all across the country growing as one, at the same rate, marking in space, all at once, their one great mutual birth.” There was a breathy silence. “Is that weird?”
“No,” Beatrice said immediately. And then, “Yes. Yes, that is weird. Christ Charlie, just get a real job.”
There was a long pause. “It’s just that sometimes it feels like there’s a meteorite headed for Earth,” he said, “and everyone’s busy selling umbrellas.”
Last week, during one of his dreamy, aimless walks, he had strayed in front of an airport shuttle bus. The bus braked and honked but Charlie could only stare at it, dumbstruck, wanting more than he had wanted anything to hop on and fly to Montana, to Borneo, to the balmy banks of the Amazon on a grand seed and specimen collection. He wanted to eat wild berries and nuts. He wanted to feed birds out of his hands. He wanted to walk through a forest that no one had ever walked through, a forest that only told its own history.
The bus driver opened the door, as if to invite Charlie in. He slowly stepped off his high seat and leaned out into the open air. Charlie held his breath. “Get off the goddamn street!” the bus driver yelled.
Charlie was worried about his health, his safety, his unstructured brain, his idle hands. Even though it baffled him, he had hoped the holiday, with its pageantry and probity, its careful arch, would help. But, so far, it is not.
After checking twice to make sure she has turned off the oven, Samantha has finally joined them for dinner, looking like her father’s daughter, jumpy and intense.
“Have you guys heard what mom and dad are doing with all their free time?” she asks her brother and sister, chewing an asparagus spear with a fierce intent. Both look to their parents. “Did you tell them?” Samantha asks.
Their mother shrugs, her head resting heavily on her fist.
“We’re doing a little writing,” their father says, “about...everything.” He waves his hand in the air, with a vague flourish.
“And?” Samantha pleads. “What else?”
“What, the dance classes?” their mother asks. “I’m taking some dance classes. Your father is taking skating classes.”
“It’s for hockey,” their father corrects. Beatrice and Charlie exchange silent glances, their mother giggles to herself.
“Some of the guys at school have a hockey team,” their father explains. “You just have to learn how to skate first. So…So there.”
“You should see him, it’s absolutely inspiring,” Samantha says.
“It’s the most painful thing I’ve ever done in my life,” their father says with a resolute nod.
“I think it’s great,” Greg says. “The dancing too.”
“What kind of dancing?”
“Swing,” their mother says, covering her mouth, as if embarrassed.
From the way they had been talking, Charlie had thought his parent’s retirement an angry, defeated thing, something more akin to his own joblessness. It hadn’t occurred to him that they might be enjoying themselves.
“I just think it’s great too,” Samantha says. “It’s really…it’s just really great.” She smiles at her parents, a quiver of emotion in her still-knotted brow. “I mean, just trying new things and starting new chapters in life. It’s just so important. Taking dance classes!” She looks to her dopey, doting husband, takes his hand in hers, “starting a family.” She lets out a small but weighty sigh. “Or going to school, starting a career,” she gestures to Beatrice.
Charlie waits, then realizes he is not a part of this trying-new-things category. He busies himself with his salad to avoid his big sister’s edgy sweetness. “We’re all just starting these bold new chapters,” Samantha says resolutely. “All of us. I just think it’s all great.” She wipes the corner of her eye in a flustered flurry; Charlie cannot tell if she is wiping a tear or if she has developed a nervous tick. She takes a breath. “Well, cheers,” Samantha says suddenly, lifting her glass, which is filled with a hidden wine she has offered no one else. Her mother and father lift their water glasses with their daughter. “To life’s work,” Samantha says, “to the work of life.” Greg clinks his own water glass with his wife’s, giving her a chaste peck of a kiss. Beatrice and Charlie fill their mouths with bread.
His love of plants began when he was six. At the breakfast table he had dissected a French tulip for no reason at all, plucking each petal, each dusty stamen, and then smashing, but gently, the ovary, inspecting its waxy machinery. When his mother saw him and her ruined purchase she had yelled and scolded, only to see in her son’s face, becoming hot with tears, that first shame of curiosity. She did not apologize, yet the next time she went to the shop she bought an extra orchid bouquet for Charlie to do with what he pleased. What he did was tear it apart, meticulously, obsessively, and draw pictures of each blossom’s many tiny pieces.
There was something about the flower’s construction—simple but complicated, inert but irrefutably alive—that seemed to answer, in some way, Charlie’s silent boyhood question: not the why, but rather the how of God. If he was to have a God it would not be the interventionist, the father/punisher, not the master showman in his crude picture book. His God would be a lowercase god: silent, mechanical, detached, made of and in the hidden potential of a seed.
By age ten he knew the names of the flower’s many parts and their functions. By fourteen he had flower boxes on every edge of the back porch railing. By eighteen he was enrolled in a botany degree, then a horticultural sciences program. And after that, until last month, he had been working for the small city Botanical Center—a stately old cluster of glass domes, whose mission was one of companionship with nature, of understanding the basic bond between the kingdom Plantae and mankind. It was a mission he could abide by, yet the informational plaques in the various rooms—“Rainforests” one read happily, “The lungs of the Earth!”—struck Charlie as reductive, faulty. Really, Charlie had little interest in informing the public. He wanted only to be witness to the lives of plants, to commune as much as he could with their perfect being: to be free of ego, of want, of myth.
The reasons for his being fired were not surprising. Their budget, all parks department cash and donor funds, had recently become a fickle, uncertain thing. He was one of two young horticulturalists in a place that needed only one. He was given a helpful severance package; he would have excellent references. Even right after it happened, having lived in that anxious public-sector world, he felt a small relief.
Yet there was grief there too. Those cloistered botanist co-workers that he would rarely, if ever, see again. The spaces and corridors of that beautiful old building he was no longer allowed. All the unspecified, almost unconscious hopes he had fostered in that job, made glaring in their sudden impossibility: that maybe he would be General Foreman someday, or Director; maybe he would open a bog wing in the fern room, start an orchid festival in the seasonal wing; maybe he would start a botanist youth program, maybe interject a little of his own philosophy into the curriculum—“Rainforests: Maybe They Want Us Dead!” They were outlandish goals, belonging to someone more civically minded than he. Still, they gave him a quiet comfort.
And then there was the actual work: the three banana plants he had been attending to whose womanly inflorescence had just opened over the summer, his favorite frizzy Cyprus Papyrus group he had communally named Glinda, the enormous Mexican Agave Century Plant whose deathly flowering stage Charlie and his co-workers had celebrated like the birth of a child. So many smaller losses wrapped up in that one, like losing a key to the room that stored all his favorite things. Alone each thought was commonplace and easily forgotten, but all together and gone all at once, Charlie felt empty, depleted, a stranger to himself.
The day after being fired, while sorting through his work files, he found a copy of the conservatory mailing list and, feeling dramatic, mailed a pressed violet blossom to people on the list with unfortunate names: Gabby Hacker, B.D. Fusmugger, Schlomo Plotsko. They all got a flower. The next day he started giving things up. The next day he started calling his sister.
“What would you do if you had a million dollars?” he had asked her that first time. “I mean seriously, what would you do?”
She sighed, thought about it. “I guess I’d pay for the rest of school, pay off my student loans. I want a house. Sam was saying it’s a good time to buy a house.”
“Really?” He was disappointed.
“Jesus Charlie. Just tell me what you would do. That’s why you asked isn’t, to say whatever the fuck you wanted to say?”
“Well, yes,” Charlie said, unmoved, “I have been thinking about it and I’ve decided I would buy as much land as I could and plant it. I would plant it and let it grow, totally unkempt, just wild. I would buy a city block and let it fall apart, let the vegetation take over. Let the trees blast through the rooftops and the vines cover the buildings. It’d be a kind of natural art installation. Then I would walk, I would live out of a backpack, and just plant trees on any unclaimed patch of land. You know, you can tell a history by the size and shape of the trees. You can tell a story by the vegetation.
I would like to create a new blip in time, a million trees all across the country growing as one, at the same rate, marking in space, all at once, their one great mutual birth.” There was a breathy silence. “Is that weird?”
“No,” Beatrice said immediately. And then, “Yes. Yes, that is weird. Christ Charlie, just get a real job.”
There was a long pause. “It’s just that sometimes it feels like there’s a meteorite headed for Earth,” he said, “and everyone’s busy selling umbrellas.”
Last week, during one of his dreamy, aimless walks, he had strayed in front of an airport shuttle bus. The bus braked and honked but Charlie could only stare at it, dumbstruck, wanting more than he had wanted anything to hop on and fly to Montana, to Borneo, to the balmy banks of the Amazon on a grand seed and specimen collection. He wanted to eat wild berries and nuts. He wanted to feed birds out of his hands. He wanted to walk through a forest that no one had ever walked through, a forest that only told its own history.
The bus driver opened the door, as if to invite Charlie in. He slowly stepped off his high seat and leaned out into the open air. Charlie held his breath. “Get off the goddamn street!” the bus driver yelled.
Charlie was worried about his health, his safety, his unstructured brain, his idle hands. Even though it baffled him, he had hoped the holiday, with its pageantry and probity, its careful arch, would help. But, so far, it is not.
After checking twice to make sure she has turned off the oven, Samantha has finally joined them for dinner, looking like her father’s daughter, jumpy and intense.
“Have you guys heard what mom and dad are doing with all their free time?” she asks her brother and sister, chewing an asparagus spear with a fierce intent. Both look to their parents. “Did you tell them?” Samantha asks.
Their mother shrugs, her head resting heavily on her fist.
“We’re doing a little writing,” their father says, “about...everything.” He waves his hand in the air, with a vague flourish.
“And?” Samantha pleads. “What else?”
“What, the dance classes?” their mother asks. “I’m taking some dance classes. Your father is taking skating classes.”
“It’s for hockey,” their father corrects. Beatrice and Charlie exchange silent glances, their mother giggles to herself.
“Some of the guys at school have a hockey team,” their father explains. “You just have to learn how to skate first. So…So there.”
“You should see him, it’s absolutely inspiring,” Samantha says.
“It’s the most painful thing I’ve ever done in my life,” their father says with a resolute nod.
“I think it’s great,” Greg says. “The dancing too.”
“What kind of dancing?”
“Swing,” their mother says, covering her mouth, as if embarrassed.
From the way they had been talking, Charlie had thought his parent’s retirement an angry, defeated thing, something more akin to his own joblessness. It hadn’t occurred to him that they might be enjoying themselves.
“I just think it’s great too,” Samantha says. “It’s really…it’s just really great.” She smiles at her parents, a quiver of emotion in her still-knotted brow. “I mean, just trying new things and starting new chapters in life. It’s just so important. Taking dance classes!” She looks to her dopey, doting husband, takes his hand in hers, “starting a family.” She lets out a small but weighty sigh. “Or going to school, starting a career,” she gestures to Beatrice.
Charlie waits, then realizes he is not a part of this trying-new-things category. He busies himself with his salad to avoid his big sister’s edgy sweetness. “We’re all just starting these bold new chapters,” Samantha says resolutely. “All of us. I just think it’s all great.” She wipes the corner of her eye in a flustered flurry; Charlie cannot tell if she is wiping a tear or if she has developed a nervous tick. She takes a breath. “Well, cheers,” Samantha says suddenly, lifting her glass, which is filled with a hidden wine she has offered no one else. Her mother and father lift their water glasses with their daughter. “To life’s work,” Samantha says, “to the work of life.” Greg clinks his own water glass with his wife’s, giving her a chaste peck of a kiss. Beatrice and Charlie fill their mouths with bread.
[Pressed flower from Point Lookout, Maryland, adhered to carte de visite mount]. c. 1863-1985. Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/info/617_apptonly.html.