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Although I didn’t start gardening until I was twenty-seven, my interest in it was sparked as a kid both by my grandparents’ wonderland of a yard and by a book my Mom bought me when I was maybe five or six, The Care Bears’ Garden. My grandmother, for all the many flowers she had, never had Hollyhocks or Foxgloves while I was growing up, so when I saw them in the book’s illustrations, I thought of them as magical storybook kind of flowers--much like the giggling posies in the Chuckle Patch on "The Magic Garden," one of my favorite childhood TV shows and probably another inspiration. I didn’t know the cute drawings were based on real flowers. Hollyhocks and Foxgloves still delight me. This week, my own Foxgloves began to bloom.
My so-far-favorite rose, Louise Odier, also opened up this week. When I was little, the neighborhood girls and I would rub onto our faces the fallen petals of our neighbor Gracie’s roses, feeling quite womanly as we did so, of course. I’m transported back to those summer moments spent crouched in front of Gracie’s plastic picket fence every time I smell this flower.
All in all, I'm a happy five-year-old while in my garden this week, even if I've stopped rouging my cheeks with rose petals.
For my birthday this year, my parents bought me prints of one of my favorite movie characters, Melanie from Gone with the Wind. I have loved these photos for years and think Olivia de Havilland is in this film the most beautiful woman ever to grace the screen. It has been an every-other-year-or-so tradition since I was thirteen for my mom and I to camp out on the couch with pillows and blankets and watch the movie together, and my parents have laughed at me every single time because I never fail to exclaim “Really! Why does everyone make such a fuss about Scarlett?! Melanie is beautiful! Look at her!” The film’s costume designers kept “Melly” in what they considered dowdy clothing and necessarily bland mourning clothes so as to contrast her with flounced-up Scarlett, but Melanie’s beauty, like all true beauty, wasn’t dependent on flashy makeup or fancy clothing anyway. (And I’d happily wear any of her Gone with the Wind costumes. Oh, for the opportunity to wear such gorgeous dresses every day! I’ll say it again: I was born in the wrong century.) Today ninety years old, Olivia de Havilland is still beautiful, but she herself has stated in interviews that out of her entire career, there was just something special about the role of Melanie and that ever since portraying her, she has found herself trying to live up to the character’s goodness. I think that goodness is precisely what sets Melanie apart from countless other pretty movie characters. Here is a woman who understands the wisdom of kindness--And you can see it in her face.
It struck me the last time I watched the movie that I’ve never heard anyone discuss Melanie and Rhett’s friendship. Delicate and modest, Melanie has more strength and smarts than maybe anyone else in the film, and Rhett himself is savvy enough to see and appreciate that. It is Melanie who listens to Rhett when he breaks down over his failings as a husband to Scarlett, it is from Melanie that an ecstatic Rhett comes up with the name for his newborn daughter, and when the little girl dies and Rhett refuses to see anyone or let the girl be buried, Melanie is the only one respected enough by him to be allowed in. When, after hours of being locked in the grief-stricken man’s room with him and his daughter’s body, an exhausted Melanie appears at the door and lets Mammy know that Rhett’s agreed to bury the girl and that she should bring him coffee and sandwiches, we know just what this woman and her friendship with Rhett is made of. On her deathbed, she implores Scarlett to be kind to him. “He loves you so.” Rhett and Melanie are unlikely friends but friends just the same. And even at thirteen, I only had to see how gentlemanly this playboy of a man was to her to know that he was ultimately good. Most women swoon over the handsome character as soon as they see him—my mom always says her “Ooh, Baby!” the first second he appears on-screen—but I couldn’t really like him until I trusted him. He passed that “Val-test.”
So now I get to see my beloved “Miss Melly” every day, and so I am reminded every time I look at her of the kind of person and lady and friend I want to be. In a line that stops me in my tracks, Melanie’s husband, Ashley, describes her as “the only dream I ever had that didn't die in the face of reality.” Beautiful.
My breaks on this weekend of working and resume-revamping have been spent on long walks and quick peeks at my garden. (And late at night before fatigue overtook me, finally reading Nick Hornby's About a Boy. There's a line in it that's so funny to me, I giggle every single time I think of it.) On my walk home yesterday, I stopped at an antique shop to ask about a couple of old metal chairs I've oohed and ahhed over the past couple of weeks. Amazingly--especially for this shop, and most especially for the small "treat budget" I allow myself--the price was right. The many decorating and gardening scrapbooks I've kept since age thirteen are filled with pictures of chairs and gliders like these, so yesterday marked the rare instance in which I practically jigged as I parted with money. One chair is rusted on its seat and needs to be sanded, and someday both these babies will be Val-ed up in glossy pink paint, but they were certainly worth the seventeen-year wait.
And ohhh, how the Bleeding Hearts continue to enchant me! ♥
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I turn thirty on Monday. Never have I been so excited to kiss a decade goodbye! see a birthday. I just returned from my morning walk to find this note from my dad tacked on to the bottom of the note I'd left for him. . . . My birthday gift was two bags of manure. Dad initially didn't see the humor in it--What? You're a gardener! It's good for your flowers! What?!--but really, this is the best saying-goodbye-to-my-twenties gift he could have given me. I am still smiling. Here's to spreading it around for a bumper crop. ♥
I was living in New York City as a first-time grad student in the fall of 2000. It was a discouraging semester, and times only got tougher as the weeks went on. On the way back to my apartment one afternoon, I decided to pop into a sandwich shop for a takeout lunch. I can’t remember now why I (ever) chose that place. It consisted of the counter and a narrow galley space with an exit at either end, it was always raucous and jam-packed with people pushing their way toward the counter and then to the exit, and I always emerged from it feeling annoyed and disheveled, like I’d just survived a skirmish. It was close to my apartment, though, and on some days, maybe that was enough.
That afternoon, after minutes of being pushed and shoved to the middle of the shop where the counter was, I was suddenly stopped by a huge black man in a business suit. He was built like a linebacker and was easily 6’8”. How I hadn’t noticed him in this crush of people was beyond me. I’m 5’2," and to be approached by anyone in this city of strangers was so unexpected, I could only stare.
Not put off by my mute staring, The Linebacker in a Business Suit bent his head down toward me and smiled. ”I just want to tell you it’ll be okay.”
“What?”
He kept smiling and nodded as if to acknowledge that he understood my startled and rude response to him. “I know things are hard right now,” he told me, “but it’s going to be okay.”
Before I could reply, I got jostled by the hordes of students packed around me. When I looked up—maybe two seconds later--he was gone. The man who had been standing at least a foot above the head of even the next-tallest person in this tiny space was nowhere to be seen. That familiar tingly feeling that always marks these kinds of moments for me was already setting in, but I maneuvered myself enough to turn around and look for him anyway. When the place was that crowded, even a paper-thin man would have had to push his way through the mobs of students and book bags-thrown-over-shoulders for a full minute before finally reaching one of the two doors at either end of the shop. The man was just gone.
When I got back to my apartment and shared the story with my roommate, she shivered and crowed, “You have the weirdest experiences!” And I do, I suppose, but I had walked away from The Lunch-Hour Skirmish Sandwich Shop that afternoon believing all the more something I’ve really needed to hold on to ever since: The Universe is aware of Little Old Me and is sending me a sign here. I believe in holding on to hope, I don’t think we’re ever alone or unloved, no matter how lonely or unlovable we may feel, and I trust that the Universe is always somehow aware of us as we plod our way through it. It's going to be okay.
Before she graduated from the university we were both attending in December of 1998, my friend Marylou gifted me with a personalized blank book. It stayed in its place on one of my apartment’s bookshelves for a few months before I decided on its purpose: The fabric-covered book would be my Book of Good Things. I would record in it every night those things that made me laugh, that made me feel comforted, that brought me joy, that showed me I was loved, and that renewed my faith in the world for another day. From the moment I decided to start the book, I found myself approaching my life—and the people and events in it—more optimistically: Of course today will be filled with goodness--because I have to come up with The List tonight! Determination to look for the good made finding it much easier.
I quickly learned that a great day was made great by “little” things, those moments that before would have been forgotten or that would have become vague memory blobs along the lines of “I enjoyed college” or “I love my family and friends.” As every student of creative writings knows, “Show, don’t tell.” So I soon saw the significance of documenting details: Funny lines from phone conversations, scenes from movies I wanted to remember, the look on someone’s face during a conversation or a moment of shared silence, the way a certain hug felt, songs and scents that would forever remind me of that day, what came in the mail, what a friend said when we ran into each other between classes. . . . Such small things, but by nightfall they became big enough to make me see that it had been a pretty good day. On some level, I knew all these things before I started the Book of Good Things, but of course, you don’t really learn something until it’s changed you in some way. One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the wise and wonderful film critic Roger Ebert: “They used to tell us in writing class that if we wanted to know what a story was really about, we should look for what changed between the beginning and the end.” In that regard, my college-era Book of Good Things is the story of how I learned to see. Writing it helped me figure out what mattered.
And the things that make for good days haven’t really changed much for me since childhood, I know now. Give me someone to love and someone who loves me, a comfy corner to sit in, fresh air, good music and good books, pen and paper to write with, something to think about, something to laugh over, and something good to eat. It doesn’t take much to make me happy. The trick is seeing it.
Daffodils could challenge Daisies as The Girls Next Door of the flower world. They know they're not flashy and that people will never ooh and ahh over them as they do with the Roses and the other more exotic beauties out there-- Daffodils have a perfect star of petals few people even notice, thank you--but they're secure in themselves anyway. Consider them a Litmus test of sorts, perhaps: Is their color "just yellow" or “sunshine on a stem"? They are voluptuous and girly with their curved trumpets and rings of frills, but also sturdy and surprisingly strong: How can such slender and nondescript stalks hold up such spectacular blooms? Quicksilver girls, Daffodils' moods change with each flutter of the wind, sometimes shy and reserved, with trumpets bowed and bobbing toward the ground, other times standing tall and in!-your!-face! with their gold stars looking at you head-on, and then wallflowers again, huddled up against each other as if deep in conversation and only half-hoping you're not paying them too much attention. And the scent! Like my favorite “perfume,” Just-Stepped-Out-of-the-Shower-Clean, Daffodils smell indescribably good. Like springtime. Or soil. Fresh air and fresh starts. They simply make me happy.
I have dreamed of having an Old English Sheepdog since I was a kid. I have cycled through stages of hoping to have children someday and then of not caring if I’m ever anyone’s mom, but I have had three dog names picked out for ages: Buster, Rowlf, and Buckingham--“Buck” for Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac fame. Just thinking about the dog makes me happy. And when I say that I dream of him, I mean it literally: My dog appears in my dreams every few months. Sometimes the dream (or what I remember of it) is simply that he was sitting beside me on the couch or that we were out walking together, and sometimes the dream is about something else entirely but my shaggy gray and white bear of a dog was there during it, plodding alongside me.
In last night’s dream, a bunch of friends, family, coworkers, and I were sleeping over at my grandparents’—camped out on the couch, in the upstairs bedrooms, and on the floor all through the house. I was curled up with a blanket on the living room floor in front of the TV, but I soon decided to get up and find my dog—I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep without him. So, I stood up and tip-toed my way through the room, trying not to step on anyone as I made my way over to the staircase. I was giddy in the dream, somehow thinking “Ooh! I hope there’s a sheepdog in this dream!” and already happy because I knew I was about to see him again. I finally found him—Buster, Rowlf, or Buckingham, I never know which one I'm seeing in the dreams—upstairs in my grandparents’ bedroom. My dog! There was just enough light in the room to make him out on the floor beside their bed. I called out to him in an excited whisper and snuggled up with him there on the floor, his fluffy side as my pillow. That was all there was to the latest dream, my most recent visit with my sheepdog.
I always wake up from these dreams missing my dog but happy—even if it was “just” a dream—to have spent time with him again. And say what you will, but it’s a nice way to start the day. Buster/Rowlf/Buckingham is out there, and someday he will still be there when I awake.
The summer between fifth and sixth grade, I spent a day crying because I hadn’t gotten the teacher I’d wanted for the upcoming school year. I had wanted—everyone had wanted—Mr. S, aka The Cool Teacher, a man in his thirties who sometimes gave out candy for correct answers and showed movies in class. My best friends would all be with him, but I had been assigned to Mr. G. Mr. G! He was ancient, at least sixty years old! He wore a suit jacket and a bow tie! I cried all day, begging my mom to have me switched to Mr. S’s class. The night before the first day of school, I cried some more, called my friends so I could wallow in their pity for me, and wrote my woes in my diary.
My diary entry for the first day of sixth grade doesn’t include a word about Mr. G or any “torcher” from the day at all. I very clearly remember the last day of that school year, however, because I ended it by crying to Mr. G that I would miss him and that I didn’t want to go to junior high. In the "last will and testament" section of our sixth grade graduation booklet the PTA always produced, my own entry didn't bequest prized possessions to friends still at the school or to classmates with whom I would soon be starting middle school. I had instead left "lots of laughs and a big smile to Mr. G." He had, of course, become one of my favorite teachers.
Mr. G appeared much older than he was, and he was quite frail, but he didn’t sleep through his classes as had been rumored. He kept a bell on his desk and would ring it to get our attention, to announce the end of our test-taking time, to get us quiet, and to keep us on-task in general. He always seemed genuinely puzzled when he would try to ring it and find it stuffed with wadded-up paper towels. Despite our hijinks, Mr. G believed that we were all good kids, and he wanted us to believe it, too, and to live up to it. He valued good manners, good posture, and good penmanship. He lamented disorganized desks and deducted points for messy work. When we would draw maps in Geography, our grades suffered if the blue crayon-strokes that marked the lakes and oceans had obviously been applied in different directions. “Of course it matters!” he would say, astonished that we felt otherwise, when we argued with him. He taught us how to diagram sentences, although none of the other teachers at the school were doing that with their classes. When the visiting music teacher punished me for something by making me stand against the bulletin board with my arms in the air, it was Mr. G who, returning early to his class room to find me standing in front of the wall with aching arms above my head, instantly cried out to the music teacher, “Valerie would never do anything to deserve that!” and told me I could take my seat. When another teacher lined us up to paddle us because a couple of students had behaved badly for a substitute, Mr. G. stepped into the hallway and talked him out of it. In times of corporal punishment, Mr. G never paddled us, and he rarely rose his voice to us either, and still we all somehow knew that he was the strictest teacher in the building.
Old-school and demanding, Mr. G was not quite grandfatherly toward his eleven-year-old charges, but he was a kind and gentle man. He would begin each day by writing a quotation on the chalkboard. A cross-stitch sampler was tacked to the bulletin board beside his desk that read, “Live your life one day at a time and make it a masterpiece.” Next to it was a black and white photograph of a young man in a suit and tie writing a letter. I asked him once if it was him in the photograph and he only smiled. When a boy in class made an off-color remark to a girl who’d asked to go to the restroom, Mr. G was outraged and gave him a lecture about the acceptable way to speak to—and about—young ladies. I walked over to his desk once with my assignment in-hand and got as far as saying, “I know this is a stupid question, but—“ before he cut me off by responding, in the sharpest tone he would ever use with me, “Valerie, no question is stupid if you don’t know the answer.”
And he learned from us, as well. The other sixth grade class—and probably every other class in the whole school—was participating in the book order program, but because Mr. G refused to get involved, we could only look on enviously as our friends in Mr. S’s class selected books and posters and calendars from the colorful brochures every few weeks. Mr. G had been burned by the book order once years before, he told us: Something had gone wrong with the shipment and he hadn’t been pleased with the service, so he never bothered with it again. We grumbled about this for awhile before hitting upon the words that would change his mind. “You have to give them a second chance!” we told him indignantly. “You don’t give up just because something doesn’t work the first time!” He told us we were absolutely right, and soon we were all looking through the little catalogs. When a girl picked an almost-dead housefly off of the classroom windowsill to see if she could revive it, Mr. G launched into a tirade about germs and hygiene and only stopped when he saw that the girl was crying. “You didn’t need to YELL at me!” she choked out as he led her over to the sink beside the coat rack. “I was TRYING to be NICE!” We all watched and waited for Mr. G’s reaction. When it came, it was so quiet, we had to strain to hear it. “You’re right, Jennifer. There was no need for me to yell at you. I’m sorry.” The fly couldn’t be saved, but the moment could be—and was.
The last day of school, after hours of playing Bingo in the gym, laughing at each other’s responses to questions posed to us by the PTA for the “Class of ’89 Yearbook,” winning candy at the end-of-year carnival out on the blacktop, and trying to blend into the cafeteria walls during the dance, we were herded back to our homerooms for dismissal. Walking back to Mr. G’s room for the very last time, it all hit me and I began to cry. Mr. G didn’t know what to do with me. “Valerie, Valerie!” he kept saying, looking baffled and rather embarrassed. It was younger, hipper Mr. S who knew to hug me and tell me I’d love junior high and could visit anytime.
I sent Mr. G a long letter soon after I started the seventh grade. He called me on the phone to thank me. When I teasingly asked him if he’d found any grammatical errors in my letter, he laughed and explained that concerns about grammar were always outweighed by the joy of having been remembered by a friend. He also told me that he’d vote for me if I ever ran for President. We talked for quite awhile, but those two moments of laughter are all I remember now. He had a few heart surgeries in the months following our conversation, I learned, and he retired soon after. We, the neon spandex-clad “Class of ‘89” had been his last group of kids and his last full year of teaching.
My junior year of high school, my English teacher started class by asking, “Now, how many of you had Mr. G in the sixth grade? It helps me figure out who’s learned what, and how well.” Instead of simply raising our hands, we School of Mr. G alum spontaneously burst into cheers and applause.
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