You can take the boy out of nature, but you can't take nature out of the boy. I am a Facilities Manager at a major pharmaceutical company in
midtown Manhattan, and for a while I had the Horticultural Account--you
know, all those plants in the hallways. It was not long after 9/11 that I realized the cast-off orchids from employees’ offices did very
well in my tinted south window. Our company is expanding, and my group has moved one block uptown, to
the 31st floor, with an entire corridor facing south from East 42nd Street. Even before we moved, I was poring feverishly over the floor plan.
The Home Depot had an inexpensive, but attractive 6" pot, tastefully imprinted with fossil ferns in grays and greens: I snatched up a dozen.
A bag of bark, some sphagnum moss and plenty of lukewarm water, and I was in business.
They are an alarming looking bunch, with a variety of strange botanical names. Arranged along the long
window sill they watch as over a rampart
and await, like primitive dancers captured in various poses of exultant
supplication, the sun. Every weekday morning at 6:15 I bestow upon them, with a plastic spray bottle, a heavy tropical mist. Mondays is the
mock monsoon: an elaborate system of soaking, with plastic dishes, portable reservoirs, nutrients, etc. The deluge lasts about 45 minutes and
then I get right back to work.
During the day my orchids blend for the most part into the decor,
quietly acting out the great mystery of life. As in the parable of the fig
tree, they are late and somewhat reluctant to bloom, but like the good gardener I am patient, persistent, and well-rewarded for my pains.
Dendrobium, a menacing looking two-foot monster, who prefers confinement in a tiny 4" pot and resembles some kind of medieval torture device, was
shipped from California via Orchids.com in Styrofoam peanuts and a thermally insulated
box and has exploded in a spectacular, glowing cloud
of purple and white. Its bloom looks like a swarm of psychedelic wasps, or a formation of diminutive
F-16s designed by Paris Hilton. Its
beauty is so extraordinary as to be incomprehensible--almost inappropriate
in the staid corporate environment. Those few of my colleagues who care to notice the silent riot think me somewhat cracked; but I believe it
meets the corporate standard for insanity and continue to tend my unlikely garden.
So I suppose it was in order to validate this odd hobby that Saturday morning I packed up the kids and set off for the New York Botanical
Garden's annual Orchid Show. My company is a major patron of the Gardens; it
seemed vaguely appropriate that we attend. Besides, my ID card would get us in free, and I'd had bowling and skating in Queens just about
right up "tuh heah". My wife Marina got home from work at 8:00am, we all had breakfast, then dressed up the kids, clambered into the
Windstar, and left Mommy to get some sleep.
Hurtling over the Whitestone Bridge I noticed in the rear-view mirror that my dark-eyed, earnest seven-year-old, Margaret, had brought along
her Hello Kitty notebook.
"How do you spell 'botanical'?" she asked, in that blithely innocent,
urgent tone that mocked her 14-year-old brother Christopher, challenged her terribly jealous, volatile four-year-old sister Charlotte, and filled
me with both pride and dread--standing, as I do, as ambassador to my three little super powers. Christopher chose to ignore the insult,
Charlotte filled the rear-view mirror with mute frustration and rage, and I
slowly spelled 'botanical', asking, once I saw that she had finished carefully transcribing the
letters, "Are you writing another of your reports?"
"Yup."
Over the four years that the five of us have been together, my
children have grown accustomed to these weekend jaunts with Dad, and today's visit to the flower show was, unlike most of the others which had
focused on their enjoyment, understood to be this time for mine, like the set of plastic Peanuts figurines I had bought at Kay Bee and
insisted, much to their surprise, was my toy, not theirs. These indirect,
tangible lessons in respect were paying off. They sensed that this was my
day; there was a pleasure for them in allowing it, trading places and playing parent
themselves. Poor old fuddy-duddy Daddy and his flowers; we'll have to keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn't stumble into
the lily pond!
I paid the bridge toll and, confused by several large orange construction signs, took the wrong exit off 95 North into a residential section
of the Bronx. Mildly terrified, but undaunted, we rounded a corner and stopped to ask a woman for directions. She had the defiant,
non-committal smile of a stranger.
"No, no, I don't know, but maybe she can tell you." I jumped out of the idling car to wait at a metal fence for an old woman who was slowly
but eagerly descending from the top of a long flight of wooden deck stairs. By the time she finally alit, I fully imagined she was going to
pull out a pair of calipers to measure my skull. She looked up enquiringly with all the sad, gentle kindness of a lifetime.
"How do I get back on 95 North?"
"Oh, that's easy, you..." and she went on to tell me, a Glinda gently waving her wand, that I'd had the power to find it myself, all along,
simply by tapping my heels together three times and repeating, "There's no place like I-95, there's no place like I-95, there's no place like
I-95." I thanked her and trotted back to my three Grand Inquisitors, relieved that during my absence no kidnapper had taken advantage of my
momentary inattention and made off with them.
Driving back up the same way we had come, only further, we crossed Lohengrin Street and Parsifal Avenue, which propelled me into the early
stages of this aesthetic swoon. I began envisioning the approaches of heroes over twilit lakes in swan-shaped skiffs; thunder gods striking
anvils to herald the scintillating dawns of Valhallas; evil sorcerers bent
on the destructions of worlds. We were all relieved to re-enter the traffic-jam, got off at the correct exit, and were virtually the first
ones into the Gardens.
It was late March, windy, and still quite cold as we shouted, danced and ran our way towards the Enid Haupt Conservatory, a "stately pleasure
dome" shimmering in the sunlight. The children ran up the steps ahead, but I paused to notice that two of the paving stones beneath me were
uneven, underlined by the ringing clink of a trowel dropped on the sidewalk by a gardener nearby.
Somewhere a carpenter was driving home nails--five, four, three, two, one...
I entered through tall doors into the tropical atmosphere of the hothouse, where the muffled closeness had hushed all comers. We were stunned,
swimming in a brilliant new
element, and my son, Christopher, seemed suddenly to understand exactly what it meant to be a responsible adult.
"Dad," he said, looking anxiously out at me as if from the Plexiglas bubble of a space-suit, "I'll take Charlie.
We'll be up ahead." This
implied, quite correctly, that I would want to linger, and that although Margaret could probably handle it, he and Charlotte could not possibly.
"Thanks, Kick," I responded, grateful and relieved, for there went Charlie, the chattering, mischievous little monkey, surprised to be back in
this ersatz Garden of Eden, dipping in and out among the protruding foliage, happy to have someone as easy as her big brother to torture, and
willing, for the short time she would allow us to get away with this, to let me for the moment off her hook.
I could have sworn I'd heard the twittering laughter of Munchkins, took Margaret's hand and we turned to face the opening display--several
"fallen trees" over the dreaded lily-pond, with small armies of crimson
phalaenopsis, or Moth Orchids, marching towards us down the logs. Fanning out from these on small earthen
peninsulas were search parties of the same, in varying shades of pink and red, that entangled themselves in small skirmishes with other species in violet and purple. I recalled Van Gogh's Irises
and in the trickling of the artificial waterfall all
the countenances of the flowers began quarreling amongst themselves, composing a strange, despairing chamber music. I had forgotten that
flowers could shriek and portray, when arranged, the frightening face of society. In this world one becomes so accustomed to ugliness that true
beauty can be sickening. I was a starving Biafran being fed real food too quickly. Luckily Margaret, who was also inspired by the riot, albeit
in a simpler, more innocent way, called out to me, tugged at my hand, and pulled me out of my maturity back into the lifeboat of her innocence.
"Dad, Dad, over here, look." She brought me crouching down to a bevy of yellow and white paphiopedilum in full bloom. I quietly explained
that these were called Slipper Orchids, because of the large pouches that fell like lantern jaws from the fronts of their flowers.
"And look at their arms", she whispered, as we both stared, stunned, at the tiger-striped, curled (by some cosmic mother-in-law with sharp
scissors, I thought) ribbon petals that extended delicate yet menacingly out at us with pre-historic grace, as if to capture in their tiny,
terrible embrace the very essence of earthy existence, kill, and drop it in
their pouch.
We found some relief in transcription as we wandered down the next few foliage-lined corridors, stopping at each new species as Margaret
carefully wrote down their names in her notebook. We passed fantastic red
and yellow geysers of Brassia, climbing troops of pink and orange Oncidium, and a clamorous, multicolored band of Vanda (some of them blue)
hanging like great green Japanese fans suspended from an elaborately arranged system of branches, each plant with its blooms bursting like
fireworks above it.
At the next bend in the Conservatory there was a break in the orchid show, a kind of intermission, and we entered another glass dome, crowded
with tall trees and big leaved plants that were meant to replicate our precious, dwindling tropical rain forests. In the center of the room
was a large steel structure of stairs and platforms that allowed us to climb up into the canopy and look down at the forest below. Way, way
ahead of us, Charlotte had already been up and down this ten times, undoubtedly at the risk of her crazy little life, and now was frantically
insisting we share her discovery. Poor Christopher, of whom I felt so proud for his gallant--if fleeting--effort at parenting, could only
roll his eyes at her insane enthusiasm, as we followed doggedly along.
"Dad! Dad? Dad? Dad!"
"Ok, honey, yes, I see. Now quiet down."
"When will this be over, Dad, I really can't take much more of her?"
"Are there any more orchids, Dad?"
We descended the stair, Charlotte ran ahead, with Christopher wearily in tow, and Margaret and I moved warily into the next room. It was a
rotunda, studded with more orchids, and we were just starting to think we'd been here and done this when Margaret caught her darling child's
breath, pretended to clutch at her heart, and threw me one of those looks of a lifetime as if to say,
"Oh my God, Dad, I've found the most beautiful ones of all." And indeed she had, it was the Cattleyas, the Corsage Orchids. I had to steady
myself. They were big. They blared. Their leaves and roots struck up the tune that closes the 1812 Overture, each bloom a BOOM that shook me to my very bones. Out of those lush white lips sang all my most delightful moments--like the first time I truly touched the love of my life;
and I fully felt, in the small arms of my daughter, who had now turned to me for security, the debt I owe to pleasure. We knelt down and
stared directly into the most gorgeous flower, a blinding flash of white, tinged with yellow that led to lavender and pink. We were looking down
the barrel of the dawn of time, to the place where, if we were not annihilated, we might find eternal life; the cure not only for cancer, or
AIDS, but even for man's inhumanity to man. There is no threat to eternity, and time is only as good as our enjoyment of it.
Charlotte had to go to the bathroom. We took her, then drove back to Queens and had lunch at MacDonald's.
