12 April 1999: Trees

The ÜberBoss just asked me if I know what happens to the Wall Street Journals every weekend. I suspect either the janitor recycles (I hope) them or a library elf appropriates them, but I don't know. I asked, over the cubicle wall, someone else, who also didn't know. The ÜberBoss said to her, "All right, we've eliminated you." And to me, "Miss Marple, let me know if you can find out."
"Okay, Hercule," I agreed.
"Oh no not Hercule; I don't have the mustache."
"Well if I have to be eighty years old, you'll have to grow a silly mustache."
"But she wasn't eighty years old, she was a Gen-Xer who worked on a computer." (The ÜberBoss doesn't believe in the 13th Generation; I'm not sure why.)
"Really!"
"Oh yes," and he invented an entire alternate history of Miss M for me.

It is this off-the-cuff silliness that ÜberBoss and Underling or even UrBoss, ÜberBoss, CoolBoss, and Underling (that's me) can indulge in without threatening anyone's understanding job and position that makes this such a great place to work. That and the fact that my CoolBoss likes Peter Gabriel, the ÜberBoss gave me Lives of the Monster Dogs, and the UrBoss's wife occasionally makes cookies for everyone.

I did start Lives of the Monster Dogs. It reminded me of Perfume ("scientific" vivisection, though a century too late) but not enough to hold my interest after the first dozen or so pages. I was glad I figured it out then: if I'd plowed through 25 pages I would have had to finish it.

Today I sat on the Plaza during lunch, held my book (Judgment of Paris) in my left hand and wrote in my journal, turned pages, and ate my lunch with my right. I sat on a bench someone else was already using the other end of, a usurping gesture that I'd pro'ly get shot for in NYC but in Denver earned me a smile and a hello, and, a few minutes later, a question: "What Gore Vidal is that?" This was just a regular looking dude in a business suit and cowboy boots (which, in Denver, isn't necessarily an affectation) reading the Post. So we chatted about Vidal, his cousin Al Gore, the Gore political family, and The New York Review of Books. That was a pleasant surprise.

This is what I was writing in my journal:

When I was growing up, I climbed each and every of the maple trees planted at farmerly intervals along the stone wall lining one side of my road. Old Lyme is a typical New England town: colonists chopped down all the trees, sowed their crops, and planted trees along the stone wall borders of their fields at proper God-fearing intervals. So anyway, by the 1960s lots of trees and underbrush had grown back, which is how you get Rush Limbaugh declaring there are more trees in New England than there were 200 years ago. That might be true, but what about 500 years ago, and what about the diversity of species?

Anyway, so we had all these great trees.

Best among them was The Climbing Tree. Most of the others you could clamber up with enough determindedness, but the Climbing Tree grew especially for climbing. It had convenient step branches low on the trunk including two horse and rider branches very low on the trunk for children too small or inexperienced to climb higher. These two branches I played my part in breaking off before I was five, by which time I could reach the schooldesk branch by way of the helper branch. The helper branch grew at a convenient 45 degreed about two feet up and was how everybody got into the tree until that broke off too, leaving a knob.

All this time a little sapling had been growing up valiantly in the Climbing Tree's shadow, growing bigger. By the time I was ten or so, the sapling was big enough to serve as a cupbearer to the Climbing Tree.

Also when I was ten, I started reading Greek mythology. The big beautiful illustrated D'Aulaire volume was on the same shelf as the Loch Ness and UFO books, so it was only a matter of time before I noticed it. And all up one side of my road grew an Olympus of trees with distinct personalities.

Athena I could shinny up a little way, but not enough to get into her branches. I didn't name her for that inviolate virginity, though, but for being the tallest and therefore the oldest and wisest. Or maybe I saw an owl within her foliage once. At the corner of the first lot, where the New Forest began, a tree grew with several branches forking out from a nest. A few mental steps brought me from bird to falcon to Vulcan to Hephaestus. The next tree grew at a slant and I used it as a rocket ship to Mars. Therefore it was Ares.

I didn't name only the maples along the road. The twin birches in my front yard were Aphrodite and Eros; the twin oaks along the driveway were Castor and Pollux. The dark fir at one corner of my yard was Hades of course, and the small deciduous tree next to it Charon. One gnarled old black-barked tree, species unknown, was the only one on the Other side of the road I named sympathetically: Tithonus, who was granted immortality without eternal youth. The dripping hemlocks at the top of the road I called the Harpies, but that was later, and only because they were at the bus stop.

I had several forts along my road. In addition to adopting Frightful from the aerie in Hephaestus, I kept house under the protective boughs of Hades, whose needles shed some rain to keep the ground underneath a muddy loam. I couldn't find a whole hollow tree like Sam Gribley did; Hades was as close as I could get, and I kept it swept clean and furnished.

More domestic a fort with a hearth and stove and inter-root cupboards was Hestia, a small withdrawn tree, partly fallen over, on the other side of my neighbors' house. From within Hestia, no one on the road could see me, which is just how Hestia and I liked it. Quite near Hestia grew the clustered trunks of the Muses.

All behind the Climbing Tree grew what I called the New Forest, whose trees I could circle with the arms of my childhood and even, in some cases, the hands. It had little underbrush and was always open and airy and light; not one specific tree but a whole little copse in its southwest corner was my Artemis. Though the copse had no spring, Actëon lay nearby, and from a good angle, its upturned roots did look like a rack of antlers.

Although I had forts on the islands of my brook, I never named a Poseidon; no tree ever singled itself out as Hera; and I named a small tree in the middle of a field Demeter for no better reason than I imagined a wheat field. I don't know what I was looking for in a tree to dub it Apollo; I don't know and that must be why I never found it. I had a single Titan: a very old and dignified Cronos grew in a marshy bit nearly on the next road over.

And so my Olympus was complete. My Zeus tree is obvious. The sapling that grew alongside the Climbing Tree I called Ganymede, and yet despite the Climbing Tree being the biggest best tree in my Olympus, and--so I liked to think--the progenitor of the entire New Forest, I never called it Zeus. The Climbing Tree it was, and the Climbing Tree it shall ever be. It's decrepit now, its trunk overrun with poison ivy (which at least protects it from being climbed by disrespectful hordes) and several of its branches no longer leafing out. But it's still my Climbing Tree, The Climbing Tree.

I fell out of it once from about twenty feet up, flat onto my back on the paved road. Before middle school, when I was still light enough, I walked out on branches the squirrels used, and this one time I fell. I don't know how I didn't do myself a serious injury, but I believe to this day in the Climbing Tree's protection. It loved me as I loved it, and if it momentarily lost its grip on me, well, it possessed sway with Providence (which I hesitate to capitalize lest I misrepresent myself) enough that I didn't get hurt. My mother told me flat out she didn't believe I'd fallen because she had no belief in the prodigious care the Tree exercised over its children, and according to her if I'd fallen from the height I claimed I'd be at least concussed if not deceased.

(And now she espouses belief in a god who, flooding the planet, drowned the trees, and who later burned a bush: hostile to trees.)

My favorite perch was the spaceship. The boys in the mean family at the top of the street named it that, as far as I remember, and I never renamed it, even after Ares. Straddling one branch with my butt on a flat spot, I could lean against the trunk and read or watch the sky while my dog browsed in the woods at my feet. The poison ivy keeps not only the disrespectful hordes but me also from The Climbing Tree's branches, and if there's any spot of peace in the world I wish I could immerse myself once again but doubt I shall ever revisit, it's that.