I was pretty good in school because I was in love with Miss Fox. I did more homework than I wanted to, and even managed a fair understanding of fractions (though I can't say it's done me much good.) But David was something else-- smart beyond my reach or understanding. It must be a terrible temptation to have so much power--you have to want to use it.
By October school became routine; everyone knew who everyone else was, and we'd all settled in to our roles. Marvin was the physical terror, David was the mental terror.
Then Marvin showed up at lunch one day with three tomatoes. He'd swiped them from his mother's vines and kept them in his bedroom until they were half-rotten, then brought them to school. He went to all the clusters of kids on the playground and opened his lunchbox to show them, then invited everyone out to watch after school.
The road where David walked to and from school was carved between two hills. Going home, David had to walk uphill in this valley between the hills. Probably twenty kids were on the hills watching when David went home that night.
I don't think David noticed us on the hills, he was so absorbed in his thoughts. He didn't notice anything until Marvin's first tomato hit him on the shoulder. The second one caught him in the side of the face and he started crying, and trying to run up the hill. The third one splattered in the middle of his back.
It was terrible, like throwing rocks at the cat. The only one who had any joy in it was Marvin.
But it got worse. David either had a father who told him to be a man, or somehow he got the mistaken idea that bullies are really just cowards and will back down if you face up to them, or maybe he just believed the story of David in the Bible too much. He came to school the next day and quietly told Marvin that they would meet after school and fight. Nobody heard it except Marvin, but Marvin spread it all over the playground.
The crowd was bigger for the fight. David was nervous but determined; Marvin just stood a little hunched over with his fists balled, waiting. David had six inches in height and probably a longer reach; Marvin had thirty pounds of extra muscle and all the skill.
David started throwing punches in an odd overhanded way, as if he were throwing a baseball. David's first four or five punches missed because Marvin was confused by David's boxing and stayed out of his reach. After a few seconds though, Marvin stepped into the windmill and let David's next punch hit him square on top of the head.
David yelled and grabbed his hand, and Marvin laid in three punches to David's face--right, left, right. David sat down on the ground and started crying. He had a split lip, a bubbling, bloody nose and an eye that turned black the next day and over the weeks became purple, then green. The fight was over.
Both guys were at school the next day. David's hand was swollen from the one punch he'd managed to land, and looking at his face made my face hurt.
Miss Fox, who was always kind, always happy, always smiling--was angry. The class was like a yard of baby chicks when the hawk flies over, panicked and nervous. We wanted her to stop being angry.
"I am not going to tell you two to shake hands because you can't force people to be friends when they're not," she said. "You never, ever solve anything by fighting." She didn't say that to David and Marvin, but to the class, then she sat down at her desk and didn't say a word for half an hour. It's been 30 years and I've yet to find her observation to be wrong.
Childish Exercise
There are some things I don't do anymore. I'm too old. I realized this while sitting in the sun at my local taco joint and watching a small--very small--girl eating in the general vicinity of her parents.
She wasn't eating with her parents, because they were sitting at a table with their food in front of them, eyes down, shoulders forward, methodically chewing through their lunches. The girl was in a wide, erratic orbit around them, swinging close to the table to take a bite of burrito the mother would hold out ("Here, EAT!"), then running away again.
I remembered doing all the same things, but over the years quit them. At least part of the reason for that had to be my mother saying, "Stop being childish," which seemed like a reasonable request at the time, but today strikes me as a very odd thing to say to a child.
Adults walk in a straight line. Kids ricochet. A walk to the car takes them all over the yard, sometimes all over the block. Some parents think that if they withhold sugar and caffeine from their kids they'll settle down, but scientific studies (that I've misplaced) have proven that puberty can only occur in children after they've run a total of 3,700 miles at full speed. Their growth is stunted if they behave.
Actually, there's a very good reason for kids wandering all over going from one place to another. Everything interesting is three feet or lower from the ground. Everything above three feet is boring--walls, pictures, tile, clocks, drapes--boring.
But the big, heavy books are on the bottom shelves. So are flowers, and garbage cans, and drain cleaners. That's where the drawers are, and TV knobs, and cats, and water hoses, and rug lint. Get down on your knees and the world is much more interesting. It isn't that adults lose interest in neat stuff, they outgrow it and are too tall to see it.
My Uncle John used to do what he called "grazin'." He'd come home from work summer afternoons, leave his lunchpail on the steps without going inside, and wander out into the yard and garden. Pick a peach from the tree and eat it. Pick a bunch of grapes and eat them. Pluck an ear or corn, shuck it, and eat it raw. Eat a tomato still warm with the sun. Then he'd go in the house. All his interesting stuff grew above three feet. Uncle John ricocheted.
Another thing. Ask a kid to do something she doesn't want to, and what does the kid say? Chances are the answer is: turn around, run away with her head thrown back and yell, "Nooooooo! I don't want tooooo!"
I wish I could do that. "Peter, here's next year's budget, will you proofread it for the sixth time before we give it to the typists for the seventh time?" "Nooooooo!" I would yell, running down the hallway, "I don't want tooooo!" But it's not really practical. If I did it, everyone would start it, and pretty soon we'd have people flying out of offices all up and down the building saying "Noooooo!" smashing into one another and scattering the work all over. The budget would never get done.
I also kind of miss walking up to a complete stranger, asking him what he's doing, and telling him how old I am. "Is your car broken and you're fixing it? I'm thirty-eight- and-a-half, I'll be thirty-nine in July." It doesn't work for adults the way it does for children.
Unfortunately, the idea of private property has been worked way into my brain. That means I can't pick something up and take it with me because it's pretty, a nice color, smooth and curvy. I don't own something because I like it, but I used to, even if it meant people would run after me to try and get it back once I walked away with it.
I don't spin anymore either. That used to be my favorite thing: to stop walking or stand up from my playing and whirl around and around until I got dizzy.
There are two ways to spin. One, with my head level, makes the world and everyone in it blur and fly away around me. The other way is to look straight up and spin so that the sky is a cloudy blue card stuck on a pin twirling right above me. I liked looking up the most because I could plainly see that I was the center and the whole universe rotated around me.
But I eventually had to stop spinning. For one thing, it's hard to explain in social situations. For another, the illusion that I'm the center of the universe isn't very useful or comforting these days. I quit spinning about four years ago.
Finally, there is one other thing I notice small children doing that I used to do and forgot about, but I'm trying to learn again. When there's a loud noise or an argument, when a child is startled or scared or confused, she stops, freezes, and becomes absolutely quiet. Like a rabbit or a lamb.
I find that reaction works very well as an adult. When I'm afraid or confused or upset, if I just stand still and keep quiet it always works out better than if I threaten or bluff or whine. I
don't know why.
Sex Among the Vegetables
What is for you coughing, sneezing, leaky puffed eyes and a clogged nose is just a side effect. What you call hay fever season is actually much more than that. It is a wanton vegetative orgy of inconceivable size.
Plant after plant is having sex right under your nose and all you can do is snivel.
Floral sex can be quite exciting if viewed from a corrupt frame of mind. First of all, the male plant gamete--which most people call pollen to keep the children from finding out--either hops the first bee from home in search of adventure or simply falls free and blows about aimlessly through the air. He's pretty shiftless and irresponsible, really not caring where he goes or about the consequences of his actions.
If chance is in his favor--if he "gets lucky"--he lands on the stigma (the "place") of a female flower of his species. Then he puts on his moves.
The pollen sprouts a pollen tube which works down a passage in the female's sex organ, drizzling enzymes from its tip to make progress easier. The tube gets longer and longer as the pollen goes about his business, poking and prying into the female tissues. This pollen tube is truly enormous, five to fifty times the length of the pollen. (I told you this would be good.)
Finally, the pollen tube breaks through into the ovary and finds an ovule and penetrates it to find an egg. (You should be getting pretty excited about now.) The sperm nuclei run down the pollen tube, jump on the egg, and fertilize it. Then they smoke a cigarette.
Although the female flower is promiscuous, you can't really call her a slut. True, any guy's pollen from her species of plant will do when she is ripe and ready, but a given egg only gets fertilized once, then the flower closes down that part of its anatomy. That's why it's okay for flowers to have a cigarette--they only ever get one.
Because everyone knows it's the pollen you're allergic to, this leads some people to jump to the rather disgusting conclusion that when you have hay fever you actually have thousands and thousands of plant sperm in your nose. This is absolutely true.
If you think that idea is disgusting, wait for my upcoming column on mold spores and athlete's foot.
But the pollen isn't actually doing anything (like sending out pollen tubes) inside your nose. It's not trying to fertilize your nose.
A pollen grain is really very polite and gentlemanly--a knight of the vegetable kingdom--until he finds his one perfect flower, jumps her egg, has a cigarette, and dies, drained of his life force and reason to live. Sound familiar guys?
No, this pollen just sits moping in your nose trying to understand what happened and why he's such a loser. No flower, failed ambitions, and stuck in your sinuses with no smokes. It's your body that makes all the fuss.
Most bad things that wander into your body (bacteria, viruses, molds) are made up of proteins. When a foreign protein shows up, your body's immune system rushes out to attack it.
Well, pollen is protein too, and even though it's no threat (I speak of earth pollen, not space pollen), your body attacks it. Not all pollen, some gets ignored, but if your body has a prejudice against that pollen, you have an allergic reaction.
It's as if your nose is South Dakota and 20,000 guys in black leather jackets show up just to talk. Even if they don't do anything, you call out the National Guard, because leather is a protein you don't care for.
Your body acts as if it's in the middle of some life- and-death struggle against this invasion of foreign protein in your nose, when actually the pollen is so wrapped up in its own self-pity that it doesn't even think of attacking your nose. Not that it could do anything if it wanted to.
Most animals are allergic to something or other, but not always pollen. The more highly bred an animal is, the more sensitive it is to allergens, so that the funniest-looking dogs, cats and horses (also the most expensive), end up doing the most wheezing, sniveling, and coughing. This is what's known among veterinarians as "true justice," or sometimes as "the boat payment."
Animals that spend much time around pollen, bees for example, seldom have allergies. In some ways that's too bad. Suppose the dreaded killer bees had allergies to pollen. Some people call these South American, others African Killer Bees, depending upon which human racial group they want to slur by association; I prefer the name World Death Bees.
Anyway, bees not only shove their unwashed bodies into flowers to get covered with pollen, but also spit on pollen and pack it on their feet. Which then gets sold in health food stores.
Imagine an allergic world death bee bringing home a load of pollen she's allergic to. First, a bee sneeze, then- -dare I say it?--hives. As testy as these bugs are, they'd sting each other to death in no time, taking a farmer, crows and a Massey-Ferguson tractor along with them in their frenzy.
Hummingbirds spend quite a bit of time with their beaks in flowers, and more hummers are allergic to pollen than people suspect. This is because a hummingbird sneeze is pitched higher than human ears can hear. Dogs can hear it (they twitch as if flea-bit), and so can bats. But bats sleep during the day while hummingbirds are out, so when they hear a sneeze, they just stir in their sleep a moment, squeak the bat version of, "I don't snore," and go back to sleep.
A Conspiracy of Trees
It is an obvious secret: in plain view and filling the landscape, but also hidden. Hidden partly out of sight underground, and also hidden in time.
Because the easy way to hide something from a person who has to be at a meeting in 15 minutes is to do the thing very slowly. Make it a slow secret, not growing noticeably from day to day as people rush to their appointments, but relentlessly growing over the period of time it takes people to rush to complete their lives and die.
The trees didn't even belong there. They didn't grow naturally on the flatlands where the snowmelt rivers rushed out of the mountains to overflow their banks and make the fields a swampland during the winter and spring, where the summer grasshoppers rasped away in the brush during the half of the year where there was no water at all.
The only native trees in the place were some willows, alders, and cottonwoods along the rivers, and solitary oaks like dark nipples on the hilltops casting a thin hot summer shade or lining the dry swales where their roots were safely above the standing winter water.
The amazing thing is that the people brought the conspiracy with them; all the other trees had to be hauled to the place: palm, eucalyptus, mulberry, ailanthus, elm, liquidambar, and so many different fruit trees.
They claimed the trees were pretty or reminded them of home, and that's why they brought them, but actually they were afraid. They needed something overhead to block out the open sky, the months of sun, the wind, and even the stars. They needed things around them blocking their view of the distance, shortening the horizon. The world was too wide, too high. The people were too small and didn't like to be reminded.
And this is the funny part. Much later some men decided (and it had to be men, women wouldn't decide such a thing) that the new trees were inferior to the native oaks and passed laws requiring the oaks to be planted in places where they never grew--along a river where the natural state was bog, or tumbled rock and sand more like napalmed earth than deep Ohio forest soil, or in swampy lowlands.
The men had an idea of what Nature should be like if Nature knew her business, but the oaks didn't respect the men's learning or their laws, and died. They died because the trees never were the servants of the men, they were the masters, and masters don't obey. And still the men plant oaks to enforce their law, and still the oaks die.
But the trees the people brought with them to protect them from the sky--the locust, birch, crepe myrtle, weeping willow, chestnut, pine, and jujube--they continued to grow and overwhelm and subvert slowly as the people rushed to their appointments. As the village grew to a town, then a city, then as the people sprawled out over the countryside, the trees followed them--catalpa, persimmon, tulip tree. They brought the trees with them.
The cons
piracy grew unnoticed. Branches slowly knit overhead. A tree sent a root thicker than a human body under a church. Blind fingers groped for building foundations, touched them, then surrounded the structure and owned the building. Pale strands found the joints and cracks in sewer pipes and entered them. Streets, sidewalks and parking lots buckled.
Buried nerves grew through underground flesh as roots pushed farther and farther out, then met the roots of other trees, touched, twisted around each other and connected. Each tree--pistache, camphor, plane, tallow, redwood, plum-- joined to a few others root to root, and those to others still, until all the trees connected and spoke to each other in the ground.
Branches, twigs and leaves fell on the people going to their appointments as a warning. Seeing only the litter and not the warning, the people gathered up and hauled away the message, lest it should fill the streets in drifts and overwhelm the city.
As the pavements cracked, new trees started in the cracks; as the sewer grates clogged with unswept debris, seeds sprouted there--palm and ailanthus. Sometimes the trees were dug out and the pavement cracks repaired and the sewer grates cleaned, but only sometimes. New trees pushed up in bulldozed lots or in the walkways between houses and weren't uprooted before they grew full-sized.
The only real hope, the cure for the trees, were the wonderful new buildings whose roots sank deeper than the tree roots and whose crowns overtopped the tallest elms to shade them. The trees couldn't grip the new buildings' foundations and wasted away in their shadow. Tall, solid lumps of stone higher and deeper than the fibrous body of trees disturbed the conspiracy, but there are so few huge buildings and so many trees--ash, carob, ginkgo, olive, magnolia--that it may never be enough.
This is only a warning.
Managing An In-Basket
There were advantages and disadvantages to going to elementary school in Spain. The things adults thought were advantages, kids thought were stupid. Funny-tasting food? the chance to learn a new language? art museums?--who cared? I mourned the loss of American TV, especially cartoons.