Maplewoods Mirror #12
On average, a bookstore browser spends eight seconds looking at the front cover and 15 seconds looking at the back cover of a book. —Greenleaf Book Group
A few days ago, while gardening on the edge of our hill, I slipped on the groundcover that keeps the hillside together. I now know why it’s called ice plant. I fell on a bigger plant that happened to have spikes on it. I never noticed the spikes before, but there was one in my arm. As I regained my foothold, I pulled out the spike, and blood, of course, spurted. It felt so silly. Plants are supposed to be friendly things, bringing beauty and brightness into our lives—not blood. I’ll get a Band-Aid, I thought, and then I’ll get back to weeding.
I stepped into the house, cupping my hand under the puncture near my wrist. The red stuff started dripping onto the floor. Funny how we’re just walking around with all this liquid in us, kept together with less than a millimeter of skin. We’re basically balloons.
In the bathroom, I washed my arm, and it was then I saw the area around the puncture swelling quickly. The bleeding had already stopped. Was that because the plant had some sort of poison that staunched the wound? Every heartbeat seemed to make the swelling bigger.
I pressed hard near the puncture to push the poison out. Drops of blood emerged, but the blood just wouldn’t reflow. Was I supposed to suck the wound like a rattlesnake bite? Flashes of Steve Irwin, the Australian “Crocodile Hunter” who died from another silly spike, one from a Stingray, came to mind. What was the plant I fell on—some strange Australian Stingray cactus? Was this the moment we all fear, some silly slip leading us off this mortal coil?
I did what every good married man does: call for his wife desperately. “Ann? Ann, are you here?” She was on the phone, and, thanks to the invention of the cordless phone, she could still be on it while walking to me. When she saw my arm, she said, “What happened?” I said I fell on a plant that stabbed me. “I’ll call you back,” she said into the receiver.
Calm and collected, she told me to sit down and not try to be agitated. Not agitated? Some poison was working its way up my arm. Of course, all I said was, “Okay.”
I wasn’t bleeding anymore, but the area was quickly turning purple. Clearly this was a plant from the genus “bad.” Was it like a black widow spider’s venom? A plumber once yanked up his shirt to show me the terrible crater and scar in his stomach left over from when he was bitten by a black widow while plumbing in a crawl space under a house. He said his wound festered for weeks. It looked like his stomach needed Bondo and a sandpapering. Would my wound look the same? Would it fester even if the doctors could find an antidote? To find an antidote, would a hospital have to helicopter off to some wacko specialist in Lancaster as on an episode of 24?
I could picture myself on that evening’s news. These days, the news always seems to start off with some innocuous thing that can be a nightmare. “A pretty plant? Think again as your garden may kill you. News at Eleven.”
Ann gave me a bag of ice to put on the swelling. How women know these things is wonderful. It’s as if they learned special things from their grandmothers: “Terrible poisonous plant puncture? Use ice.” She called my doctor's office as I was evaluating my state of mind. Dizzy yet? Not yet. Would I at any moment I fall into a state of hallucination? Most likely. Would I speak in tongues? I’d never learned a foreign language well. Perhaps this was my chance.
As she was on hold for a nurse, she asked me to show her the plant. Thanks to the invention of the cordless phone, she could walk with me outside and stay on hold. I pointed to the green spiky plant, the terrible monster.
"Oh, that," she said. "That's Aloe Vera. It's a healing plant."
The nurse came on the phone and Ann relayed what I’d fallen on. The nurse wanted to talk with me. Long story short: he said as long as I wasn’t dizzy (I wasn't), I didn't need to come in.
So I'm healing. It’s a healing plant.
Listen, men: women know everything. The sooner you learn that, the sooner you can make it through this gauntlet called life, including the horror trap of the garden. I feel much safer now that I’m inside at my computer, my wife cooking something to bring back my vital essence. Of course, the evening news will find something terrible about computers, too. Until then, I’ll keep typing.
My new camera, by the way (Canon S3) can take close photos, I’m showing you the spike and one of the drops of blood I found this morning that trailed into the house. I also defanged the plant. I have weeding yet to do.
Kurt Vonnegut didn’t
have to die last week to make me say he inspired me to write. A simple cold would have worked. As Los Angeles Times writer David
Ulin wrote on Friday, Vonnegut “opened up the world--he was so much fun to
read, a stunning contrast to what we thought of as literature.”
I happened to first
come across Vonnegut’s writing during my junior year abroad in Denmark. I
went there ostensibly to live with my Danish girlfriend, Pia. Once I landed in Copenhagen, I learned she
was living with another guy, someone named Peter. With her Danish accent, the name sounded more like
“pay-dirt.” It wasn’t the best way for
me to learn about Danish accents.
Depressed to say the
least, I had to live with her parents until my university program started in a
month. At least she invited me to a
party, even if I had to accompany her with Peter, and it was there I came
across Slaughterhouse Five in the bathroom. The film of the book
happened to have been shot in my neighborhood in Minnesota next to my
grandmother's house, but I had never read the book. There in the bathroom
outside of Copenhagen, I started to do so, and something emerged from my throat
that hadn’t appeared in weeks: a laugh.
The host later said I could borrow the book. So began my love of
Vonnegut’s work. He could make me see how humorous and human my journey
to Denmark had been.
Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s
Cradle is my favorite. In it, he
creates words such as “duprass,” which is a group made of only two people, two
people who are their own universe together—the kind of people who are so in
love, they complete each other’s sentences.
Of course, I couldn’t finish Pia’s sentences because when she spoke Danish,
it was akin to marbles in a blender. Even so, I thought we had had a duprass. Another Vonnegut word is “granfalloon,” which is a large false
group, such as Minnesotans. Just
because I grew up there, ya know, doesn’t mean I really have connections to the
state of being “Minnesotan.” Bob Dylan
is from Minnesota. He’s in my
granfalloon.
Vonnegut’s essays
weren’t as funny, maybe because they bubbled with cynicism. In a 1991 essay, he wrote that humanity was
“an unstoppable glacier made of hot meat, which ate up everything in sight and
then made love, and then doubled in size again.” This isn’t to say that’s not true. What I like about this and many of his clearest moments in his
books is that he touches truth. In
“Cat’s Cradle,” he created a religion called Bokononism, believers of which would
whisper “busy busy busy” whenever they thought of “how complicated and
unpredictable the machinery of life really is.” It is, isn’t it?
He saw humor,
however, as a way to cope. In a 1976
interview, commenting on his being an airman in World War II and in a German
POW camp in Dresden when American planes firebombed the city, he said, “I saw
the destruction of Dresden. I mean I
saw it before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterwards,
and certainly one response is laughter.
God knows, that’s the soul seeking some relief.”
May he laugh in
peace.
If you’d like to
read a fairly recent interview with Vonnegut, try this, a PBS transcript: http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcriptNOW140_full.html
Or this: http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=38_0_4_0_C
Or this: http://www.salon.com/books/int/1999/10/08/vonnegut_interview/