When my younger son visited over the Fourth of July, one of his first comments was, “I never realized you had so much agapanthus.”
Of course, I knew immediately it wasn’t my real son
and that I would have to petition the embassy on the planet Klingon for his
release. Because this botany-identifying
facsimile was not the one I raised who knew exactly two types of flowers: orchids for prom corsages and roses for Valentine’s
Day.
Just so you understand, my real son loves math,
economics, and sports. He regarded high
school Art History as a forced march through Circles 1-9 of Hell. I do not exaggerate when I say he could
easily have been elected “Kid most likely never to utter the word
‘agapanthus’.” Rather, his idea of a
good time as a sophomore was to enter a school contest as to who could memorize
pi to the greatest number of
places. He won at 301 (that last digit as
insurance in case a competitor memorized 300).
But plants?
Um, not so much. Even those prom
corsages were largely orchestrated by Mom who attempted to pry information from
him as to, say, what color the girl’s dress might be, or whether she preferred
a wrist corsage. These queries generally
elicited a look of a deer caught in the headlights of a Mack truck.
300 digits of pi,
on the other hand, were easily remembered by breaking up the digits into
sequences of five numbers then stringing the sequences together. The inter-relationships of flowers and dresses,
however, was a murky slough of aesthetic despond into which he had no desire to
wade.
As the Fourth of July weekend progressed, it
appeared that the forces on Klingon had indeed replaced the fake Klingon son
with my real one until a barbecue one night when he surveyed our flower garden
and observed “the downside of agapanthus is that they have such a short
blooming season.” I had the Klingon
embassy back on speed dial within seconds.
As it turns out, the reason my pi-loving progeny is suddenly so interested in things botanical is
that he and his wife now own a home. Well,
a bank owns the home but they have a proprietary interest. I
would have thought he would have left landscaping decisions to his wife but
she, although possessing lovely taste all on her own, wishes his input. And he, wisely, wishes to make her happy.
My husband, Olof, has always maintained that when
husbands (or even husbands-to-be) are queried about their opinion on anything
aesthetic, the correct (and only)
answer is, “Wouldn’t blue be better?” He
swears it works on all interior design selections, landscaping options, and especially on wedding planning decisions
which is where he himself honed this strategy.
It fulfills the illusion of participation, he maintains, without
entering into the Dantean world of actual aesthetic opinion.
But my younger son was now perusing our yard – the
very same yard he grew up in and in which I would swear that he could not previously
have identified a single piece of flora – and was avidly interested in what our
plants were called, how often we had to water them, did they attract white
fly? Although he’d never paid attention to
it before, Mom’s long-term landscaping strategy of “Plants You Can’t Kill” had not been lost on him.
As for pi,
he will apologetically state that 15 years later, he can only still remember
the first 50 digits which he happily rattled off in some four seconds
flat. That’s how I knew he was my real
son and I could stop calling the embassy on Klingon. Somewhere in that brain where 251 more digits
of pi used to reside is a veritable
Google Images of agapanthi and shade trees, border plants and drought-resistant
shrubs. Sometimes as a parent, you just
have to live long enough.
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