Bamboo

(Written 5/23/05)

Anne Lamotte says in Bird by Bird just to write something that comes to your mind even if it isn’t good, so here goes.

My husband has a thing for bamboo. He has different kinds growing around the house and some of it does well and some of it doesn’t, but he never gives up. A few years ago his son gave him one of those little bamboos that you can get in the malls all over Southern California. Three little sticks of beautiful bamboo with lots of bright green leaves are put into a decorative bowl with stones to hold them up and some water. His son had added a panda.

This bamboo never did well. Maybe it caught a bamboo disease, or maybe it came from poor genetic stock, or maybe it was just a bamboo lemon. It turned yellow and the leaves kept falling off. It was practically dead, but it never went and actually died so you could throw it away. It would be naked and pathetic and then a tiny greenish leaf would start to grow. It sucked you in,  just like the men in some of my past relationships; just when you’re ready to throw them out, they do something that gives you hope that they will finally live up to their potential. 

My husband took care of this thing for years. He’d try different plant foods,  different spots with more sun or less sun, more water or less water. It was ugly and depressing, and every time I walked past it, I just itched to get rid of it. Whenever I hinted at that possibility, he would strongly defend it, tell me he liked it, say he’d just given it a new food and it was now getting better, he was sure. I considered going to the mall and buying a decent piece of bamboo with some leaves on it and secretly replacing his shriveled up sticks with it. But my husband is one of those men who notices EVERYTHING, every little detail, just like my father.

When I was 15 and getting my drivers license, my mom let me back the car out of the garage all by myself one morning. I managed to hit the side of the garage on the way out. My mom and I jumped out of the car and stared aghast at the devastation. The garage door hung crazily half up and half down,  and the garage wall was pulled out about three feet off its foundation. Unbelieveable. My father was gonna kill us. He was going to yell and shout, tell us we were stupid and irresponsible, and he was going to ask how on earth my mother managed to show such poor judgment once again (she who actually supported the family, but that’s another story). He did this whenever we did anything he considered wrong and this time we’d made a real mess. Majorly!

My 5’- 4” 110-pound mother suddenly burst into action, galvanized by some sort of surge of superhuman strength. The garage door was sagging because one of those huge springs had come off, and she grabbed that thing with her bare hands and somehow pulled it down and hooked it where it belonged. She got the sledge hammer and slammed the garage wall back onto its foundation. Then we shakily examined the crime scene for evidence. To our amazed relief, everything looked OK except for one small crack on the concrete footing between a couple of 2 by 4s just inside the garage door. We looked around and found a brick and laid it over the crack. We put dust on it. It looked like it had been there forever. 

When dad came home that evening, we tried to act natural, but out of the side of our unbelieving eyes we saw him walk a straight line, without hesitation or looking around, to that brick, like a heat seeking missile, and pick it up and ask in an accusing tone, “What is this brick doing here?” My poor mom burst into tears and confessed everything. I thought we were done for -- he wouldn’t let me drive until I was 30 or 40. But he remained calm and only said in a deeply aggrieved way, “Now why would you think I’d get mad about something like that?”

My husband notices everything just like that. He puts it to good use. When we go bird-watching he is always the first person to spot the bird. He doesn’t know what it is, and he doesn’t care what it is. He doesn’t keep a list, and he’ll forget the name of it right after all the rest of us follow his directions and see it and get excited and say “Wow, a yellow-naped leaf-thrasher, that’s fantastic.” This can get quite annoying when he spots a life bird and I never manage to get a look at it. I now keep a list of life birds that he’s seen and I haven’t.

So it was no use buying a substitute bamboo. After years of careful nurturing, his bamboo reached a state where even he agreed it was dead. He tossed it in the trash, without a thought, and I of course missed the darn thing and went around in mourning all day.