Category Archives: Think About It

#27 – The Capriciousness of Cartoon Flowers 

Think About It

rebel daisy sits thoughtfully on a rock, composes himself, and begins to pen an angrily worded letter to the National Biscuit Company to… 

“Can we just say Nabisco?” rebel daisy stops me mid-sentence. “National Biscuit Company sounds so… highfalutin. Affected.” 

“Yeah, okay,” I say.

“And lose all the ‘sitting thoughtfully on a rock’ nonsense. What does that even mean?”

I sigh. “I’m trying to set the mood.”

“Well, it’s putting me in a bad mood. So if that’s the mood you’re trying to set, then well done.”

“Fine,” I roll my eyes. 

rebel daisy stands on a piece of paper and begins to pen an angrily worded letter to Nabisco. 

“Is that better?”

“Yes,” he says. “Carry on. I’m dying to hear what happens next.”

I stare at him for a moment – trying to remember what my life was like before this psychotic eight-inch tall flower sporting jeans and army boots marched into my consciousness. I wasn’t even doing drugs.

“Wow. Is that how you see me?” he says propping up his pen, leaning slightly into it, and staring up at me, blinking. “As a psychotic eight-inch tall flower?”

“If the army boot fits…,” I say.

“Ha! Clever,” he laughs, then scratches his pollen-speckled head with the sharp-tipped fronds of his leafy fingers. “It doesn’t lend much to the story though.”

“Can I just continue?” I ask, exasperated. “Please?” 

“Why are you asking me?” rebel daisy shrugs, carefully hoists the pen back up over his narrow shoulder, and begins writing his letter again. “I mean, you’re the author,” he says. “I’m just the talent. Though some might argue there’s no story without the talent,” he pauses. “Most would argue that, actually…”  

ANYHOW, rebel daisy is writing said letter to Nabisco because he is upset that they will not honor his request to make a special edition rebel daisy Oreo cookie. They were concerned that his plan for the cookie would be ‘too cost-prohibitive.’ Furthermore, it would ‘deny the laws of physics.’ In the schematic that rebel daisy sent, there is no actual cookie. It’s merely the white stuffing carved out into the shape of a daisy flower. His face is drawn in the center which is dyed yellow. 

“Seems completely feasible to me,” rebel daisy interrupts, dragging the pen across the paper. He’s just putting some flourish on the n in the word ‘moron.’ 

“Well, first of all, just the stuffing isn’t technically a cookie.”

rebel daisy looks over his shoulder at me. “I can’t be bothered with technicalities.”

“And,” I add, “you insisted that each so-called cookie have an operational mouth. I think that might be the bigger issue they’re logicistally struggling with.”

“I’m not willing to bend on that one,” he says, beginning to compose the word ‘genius.’ “It can’t possibly be that difficult.”

“Maybe not in your little buttery head,” I say, frustrated.

“I see no need to be diminutive,” he says, looking back over his shoulder at me. “Plus, it doesn’t become you.”

SO ANYWAYS, rebel daisy is penning this letter to Nabisco when his dear friend Sturmund Drang enters the room. 

“Hi Sturmund!” rebel daisy calls out.

“Greetings,” Sturmund responds in a weary voice that would indicate he carries the weight of the world. 

Sturmund is a small sunflower with a particularly dower disposition – which honors his family’s longstanding German heritage. His attire is a yellow raincoat with matching rain hat and rain boots. He carries an umbrella with him at all times because one can never be too prepared. When Sturmund sloshed into my consciousness about a year after rebel daisy did, I was tickled by his presence. 

“He was my friend first,” rebel daisy interrupts again. 

“Yes, he was,” I say to appease him.

“I’m standing right here.”

AT ANY RATE, when Sturmund introduced himself, I was taken by his name – immediately recognizing it as a merging of the words Sturm und Drang which was, as everyone knows, the late 18th-century literary and artistic movement in Germany influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and characterized by the expression of emotional unrest. 

“It was?” rebel daisy breaks in once again.

“Yep,” I respond, excitedly. “And I love the idea of a sunflower, an iconic symbol of warmth and brightness, having a name that translates to mean storm and stress. It’s wonderfully ironic!”

“Hmmmm,” he lays down his pen and stretches. “I just think it’s weird. Makes me wonder about his parents. But enough about Sturmund. Let’s get this story back on track and start focusing once again on my heroic efforts to be immortalized by Nabisco.”

“You really think heroic is the word?”

“Not enough?” rebel daisy ponders. “Magnanimous maybe?”

“I think magnanimous is accurate,” says Sturmund in a nasal voice. He blows his nose. “I can’t make any sense of why Nabisco would pass up this opportunity. It’s pure folly.”

“Right?” rebel daisy shouts, fired up now and rearin’ to get back to his letter writing. “Magnanimous it is then.”

rebel daisy sets the pen to paper, but then just stands there. “How do you spell it?” he asks sheepishly.

Sturmund shrugs. “I only know how to spell it in German.”

“German?” rebel daisy ponders again, placing his verdant hand to his yellow chin. “Hmmmmm. That could work. It appeals to my rebellious nature. Okay. Go ahead and spell it in German.”

At this point, I’m just standing off to the side and patiently, I might add, watching their antics. I no longer remember where I was going with this story anyhow.

“G-R-O-Eszett,” Sturmund begins.

“Wait,” rebel daisy stops. “What?”

“Eszett,” Sturmund repeats himself calmly then sniffles. 

“What the hell does that mean?!” rebel daisy, by contrast, hollers.

“It’s a letter in the German alphabet that looks like a B but sounds like an S. Eszett.”

“That’s ridiculous,” rebel daisy says, shaking his head and mumbling, “Germans,” under his breath.

Undeterred, Sturmund walks over to rebel daisy and extends his willowy dark green arms so that rebel daisy will hand him the pen. “Here. I’ll show you.” And he carefully writes out the word ‘Großmütig’. “That right there is German for magnanimous.”

“No,” rebel daisy responds.

“Yes,” Sturmund points. “That’s it.”

“No, I mean I don’t like it!” rebel daisy stomps his boot on the word. “It doesn’t look magnanimous at all!”

Sturmund stares down at the word but says nothing.

“Erase it immediately!” 

“I’ll do no such thing,” Sturmund says, stoic and indignant so as to, once again, not betray his German heritage. “Furthermore, I cannot erase pen ink.”

“I’ll tell you what you can erase,” rebel daisy shouts, his petals shaking. “Our friendship!” 

I’ve had enough. I begin to meagerly slink away and attempt to escape this flagrant display of floral decrepitude. I tiptoe to the kitchen to have an Oreo. A real one with actual cookies. And without an operational mouth. As it should be. 

“I heard that,” says rebel daisy. “Because I’m still right here.”

I close my eyes and sigh. “Yes,” I think, sinking my teeth into the cookie and the stuffing. “He’s always right here.”  

#7 –  The Advantages of Invisibility

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I find it a bit… amusing, I suppose.

The way that they disregard me when I try to make even the lightest conversation. I order my coffee or bagel or drink (if I’m feeling particularly festive) and my attempt to engage with them is met with that pained expression of paralyzing ennui. As if I’m sharing the history of socks. They seem incapable of humoring me for even a moment. 

I’m not sure when this happened; when I became so ignorable. It’s not an entirely unpleasant thing though.

It does leave me questioning whether this is how I treated those who were thirty years my senior when I was their age though. When I was sure I knew it all. I probably did, to some extent. Treat them that way, I mean

“Here’s your latte,” says the barista, the milky skin of her face like polished porcelain, her t-shirt displaying words that are important to her but to me are gibberish. I nod and say thank you as I gather my drink and she lobbies back a perfunctory smile.

I decide to sit down and enjoy my drink for a little while before heading out. I move toward one of two empty spots and gingerly pull the metal chair from its spot cozied under the table. I know from experience here that to pull it abruptly will cause a horrific noise that’s counter to any sort of relaxation. Unfortunately, the woman taking the other seat is not privy to the same information. Or is at least insensitive to the possibility. The resulting nails-on-chalkboard sound of the metal legs scraping against the concrete floor stirs my nervous system in much the same way that visiting the hospital did when Uncle Vance was dying and his long-suffering flesh castle was about to collapse.  

Uncle Vance was, for all intents and purposes, my father. He was a writer. And a well-known one, at that. He’d found particular success with a provocative memoir he penned that may or may not have been factual. This was back in the days, mind you, when facts held sway. Anyhow, I read the memoir once. Can’t say I remember much about it. What I do remember is that Uncle Vance had unusually small teeth. He was missing his left canine too, which gave him the appearance of a perpetual second-grader. It was a strange visual juxtaposition to his unfailing ability to casually spew messages mixed with ultra-far-right politics, unabashed racism, and, oddly enough, a deep knowledge of Icelandic folklore.

Oh, how I used to beg him to share some of those exotic stories with me. “Please, Uncle Vance,” I’d say. “Will you tell me the one about the caribou and the glacier?” I’d ask. Of course, I had no clue if there was any actual story about a caribou and/or a glacier. I just assumed the odds were in my favor. 

He never did share any of those stories. Not once. 

In retrospect, I didn’t like Uncle Vance. When I was suddenly orphaned and shipped off to live with him and my Aunt Adele at the age of four, I assumed that I did like him. After all, he was going to be replacing my father so I’d have to like him. Because that’s what you do, right? You normalize your caregivers’ behavior so you have a fighting chance in this world. Then when you’re strong enough to stand on your own two feet, you take a more critical look. If you’re lucky, you still like them. Or at least respect them. Neither was the case with Uncle Vance. Maybe if he’d read me one story, just ONE story, things would have been different. But, well, you can’t go back in time.

I take a long and languorous sip of my latte and glance out the window at the shiny grey streets. It’s been raining for three days here in Seattle. It feels to me as though the dampness has seeped through my skin, soaked my muscles, and is now threatening to water-board my bones for no good reason. I’ve been here enough times to know this isn’t unusual. Still, I don’t care for it. The young baristas behind the counter giggle and swap stories about their respective drinking adventures last night. I miss those days. But not as much as I thought would. 

My mind wanders back to that pivotal visit with Aunt Adele thirty years ago. She’d called me because she was going to be in Phoenix and wanted to share a story with me about Uncle Vance. My first instinct was to resist, as I certainly didn’t want her telling me something that might change my opinion of him for the better.

“You have a brother,” she said to me that warm and sunny afternoon. The beams were stinging the sun-damaged skin on my arms.  

“Oh, Aunt Adele,” I said in what I can only imagine was a condescending tone. In my 26-year-old worldliness, I assumed she was either having a stroke or suffering early-onset dementia. “That just can’t be.”

“Oh!” she waved her hand across her face and flashed me a wide regular-sized tooth grin. “I should clarify. You have a stepbrother, actually. And, as it turns out, a cousin too.”

“I do?” I was confused. 

She nodded and then got a little smaller. I’d always had an affection for Aunt Adele. She was usually big and boisterous and I knew that if she’d had Icelandic folk stories to share, she would have. But whenever Uncle Vance was around, she shrank into herself. Every. Single. Time. That day, she was doing it in his absence.

“His name is Patrick,” she began. “He was born with Down syndrome and sent to a training school in Seattle just before you arrived,” she said, shrinking further into herself as though Uncle Vance were right there.

I sat there, dumbfounded. Patrick was never once mentioned in Uncle Vance’s memoir. That much I remembered.

“It’s what Vance thought was best.”

I wanted to ask her why she didn’t fight for her son. Why she didn’t just gather up Patrick and run away. “It was 1966,” she said, as if reading my mind. “I didn’t really have a say in it. Because that’s just how… things were done back then.” 

Perhaps I should have been more aghast or felt betrayed that day. Instead, I was excited. My family tree had been relatively bare. This added an important branch. And who was I to judge Aunt Adele anyhow? She’d done her best. 

I really want to believe we are all doing our best. The young people who overlook me now, the ignorant noise-makers, even Uncle Vance. His best was just plain lousy and putrid. 

I finish my coffee and place my mug in the bus tub. I nod at the barista, but she doesn’t notice. That’s okay. Before I step out into the rain, I check to be sure I have brought both books with me from the hotel. My brother loves it when I read to him. And I firmly believe we should all be willing to share stories – Icelandic or otherwise.

* (excerpts from The Atlantic magazine)

2020 Is Over, So Now What?

Think About It

I’ll make this short and sweet. Or short, at least.

As I write this, there are six hours and 12 minutes left in the year 2020. Am I ready to bid this year adieu? Sure. Tomorrow marks the beginning of 2021. The beginning of something new. And yeah, I dig the symbolism and all that. But let’s be real. It’s technically another day.

It’s not as if January 1st is going to be some sort of magical elixir that will enlighten the far-right naysayers and far-left conspiracy theorist anti-vaccers of their ignorance or their unwillingness to see the harm they’re causing.

If I sound irritated with these two factions, you haven’t misinterpreted. But my irritation isn’t simply my inability to comprehend them. It’s because I understand them all too well. Both of them.

As much as I don’t want to admit it, at different points in my life, I have pitched my tent in each of these camps. I grew up in a conservative household where the name Reagan was like royalty. I was even ready to vote for Bush (senior) in the 1988 election, though I was so complacent I didn’t even bother voting.

Four years at a fairly liberal college shifted my views. So while at 18 I was content to call myself a Republican, by the age of 26, I was a card-carrying independent who voted for Ralph Nader, got on board with the paint-throwing members of PETA, and was an avowed anti-vaccination advocate.

So I understand where both of these groups reside. Because when I subscribed to these extreme beliefs, I was working predominantly from fear, lack, and limitation. And it was a miserable place to be. By my mid-30s, I’d had enough. I began doing the self-work required to seek more balance in my life. Self-exploration and -investigation is no walk in the park. A lot of the time, it sucks. But it’s a journey worth taking.

It seems that 2020 really ramped up, exposed, then preyed upon those dictated by fear. It certainly got the best of me. So my hope for 2021 is that folks start to recognize how much fear dictates their own lives, do the hard work involved in finding balance, and just be freakin’ nice to each other.

We’ve got a lot of work to do.