Know me, know my botanical garden fetish.

It began in 2006 with a trip to Montreal and, I admit, got worse last summer with another trip to Montreal, where I actually trekked out to the botanical gardens one afternoon. And then there was the Huntington. Today, again, at Como Park in St. Paul. Actually to be specific it was a conservatory, all under glass, and lovely in the wintertime, my parents assure me, but in the summer it is merry, how? Tropically. (I prefer “trapically” because, you know, the play was called “The Mousetrap” so it’s a tidy little riff for Hamlet to make. Minching malecho, for O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot, and so forth.)

I am not indifferent to flowers; I like to look at them, to smell them. But I have no passion for them save when they are in front of my lens. Then they are like heads, almost. I like big lilies in profile, other clustered flowers in quarter-profile, tight round things like new roses and geraniums and the like head on - though when I take the last, I can’t help but think of the top lamp of one of these guys:

Any rate. Here’s the haul from today.

Eerily extraterrestrial vine sort of thing. I believe the description said the tentacles move when no one is looking.

Full on shot of something the name of which I never did learn. I am generally quite bad at identifying flowers; chalk it up to an early fear of horticulturists.

Here are some yellow-greenish lilies that were clustered together. They seem to be gazing off in different directions. Or I am anthropomorphizing far too liberally. Either way.

What an absolutely glorious statue. I especially love her shoulderblades.

A Dalek-shot of this moon-looking thing, if ever there were one.

And another, of a Gerbera daisy. This I dedicate fondly to my mother.

A rare semi-profile of a variegated rose. My mother was pointing all these out to me as we walked - I’d have missed quite a few if she hadn’t spotted them, this being one such near miss. With colors like that it ought to taste of peppermint.

Here is my lily profile, straight up, slightly underexposed, like I like them.

The patient guardian of the contemplation pool.

And we end with something not flora at all, but decidedly urban, because what caught my eye first was the picture of the welder, very 60’s sci-fi, and second the splotches of bright aqua spray paint beneath. This is a dumpster. Who know they could be so interesting? They are not so in New York.

It was also the first time anyone called me an ice queen.

I was sitting in the airport the other afternoon, making a feeble attempt to read a book while I waited for my sister to come pick me up, and I kept hearing the same set of names being paged over the PA. Then I started paying attention, because, look, does someone actually have to say the names over and over again at regular intervals like that, or does someone only record the names once and then push a button to play the names over and over again at regular intervals?

You might be able to guess how long it took me to realize the answer.

Then I wondered: why do these people keep getting paged, like that, for over an hour? Don’t they ever hear their own names? Because the one time in my life that I was paged at an airport, I certainly heard my own name, albeit distorted and distantly.

Here’s what had happened: I was in Chicago with my parents during the summer before my senior year of high school. It was early morning. I was dreaming. I was a princess with a lovely gown and I sat all day in a beautiful castle and because I was a princess I could do whatever I wanted and what I wanted to do was to swallow raisins whole.

I woke up after one such swallow to discover that the retainer that covered my bottom incisors was not in my mouth. And it was not on the couch where I slept. Neither was it on the floor. I had a flight to Boston for a six-week summer program later that morning.

Maybe forty or so minutes later, my dad and I were waiting for the doctor to come and read my x-ray. In swept the nurse, who had been watching E.R., and she asked in her throatiest, most dramatic voice, “How badly do you need to get to Boston today?”

“Pretty badly,” we answered. The program - run out of M.I.T. - matched you up with a mentor in your field of interest and gave you four weeks to work together to conduct a research study, and another week to write up a presentation and a paper. I got matched up with an orthopedic surgeon/researcher at Beth Israel, so I spent my four weeks poking at the severed spines of cattle and humans. One day I walked into the freezer to get our vertebrae so as to run some tests, and there, in a zip-lock bag, was a human foot. Another day, one of the scientists at the lab asked me what I thought this was; he held up a slab of flesh and bone that turned out to be a shoulder.

“Well,” huffed the nurse, after she had left an appropriately dramatic pause, “you’re not going.” They wanted to pump my stomach. They might have to do surgery. No way could I go to Boston that afternoon, or maybe ever for that matter.

The nurse was prepping me when the doctor came in. “It’s the damnedest thing,” he said, scratching his head, “I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m going to have to run it past the GI guys. Do you feel any pain when I do this?” He pressed some areas of my abdomen and I shook my head each time. “Well,” he said, looking at me as though I had suddenly turned blue, or grown an extra head, or some similarly improbable phenomenon had befallen me, “I guess you can go. Take a copy of the x-ray with you, in case they stop you at security.”

The nurse backed away, crestfallen.

At the airport, we spotted Gene Siskel, waiting to get on a plane. My parents hugged me and told me to call once I’d got to Boston. I kept the x-ray on my lap all through the flight, so it wouldn’t get bent. I found the group that was meant to meet me at the airport, we got our luggage, and we were waiting for a taxi to take us to M.I.T., when one of the grad students in charge of corralling us tapped me on the shoulder.

“Are you Lianne Habinek?” he asked. “Because they’re calling your name inside.”

At the kiosk I had a phone conversation with a befuddled operator who, because he couldn’t connect me up to the doctor on the other line directly, was relaying information between us. “Something about getting to the hospital as soon as humanly possible?” said the operator. “Because the retainer got stuck in your pyloric sphincter? What the hell does that mean? Did you really swallow a retainer?”

The doctor had only recalled that I was meant to be going to Boston that afternoon, and then on to M.I.T., so to cover his bases in case he couldn’t reach me at the airport he called the campus police as well. I found this out after a long ride in a hot taxi with vinyl seats and a Polish driver who didn’t know how to get to M.I.T., exactly, and was wondering if any of the high school kids in the car might know, but no such luck.

What I can do is this trick that is kind of like holding my breath. I have had chronic anxiety for much of my life, which is not a pleasant thing, but my one trick is that when I am confronted with a Situation I can block out the panic and simply plow through. Then when things are done I collapse into a heaving mess and am of no use to anyone for hours on end. For example when I landed in L.A. this February I had hardly driven a car in seven years and certainly not on the freeway. I gritted my teeth and missed my exits and my turnoffs and let the fast food I’d gotten, the only solid food I’d had that day, get lukewarm and tasteless on the seat beside me while I blocked it out and plowed through until I found my way to my uncle’s condo. In all I estimate I was in the car about seven hours that day, for a set of trips that together should have taken forty-five minutes tops even in crawling rush-hour traffic.

So like I said I can block things out, which is why I only started to panic when I was at the M.I.T. medical center waiting while that doctor examined my x-rays.

He began to chuckle. Then to laugh.

“You don’t feel any pain, do you? None at all?” he asked. I shook my head. “There’s nothing wrong with you. That baby’s going to take the night train. I bet you’ll see it in a day or two, but we’ll get you in for another x-ray just to be sure.” He handed me a plastic tray, several sets of latex gloves, and a pile of wooden tongue depressors. “You can use these to find your retainer again, which unfortunately you have to do.” He really did look sorry as he said this.

Then he laughed again. “So you want to be a doctor?” At that point I did - some days, in fact, I still think about it. “You’ve got poise. You’re incredibly cool. How did you keep so stoic, so calm? That’s an impressive feat, particularly when they’re yelling your name over the airport loudspeakers and the police are swarming the campus looking for you.”

He was pleased with the second x-ray, the next time we met. A day or so later my retainer and I were reunited. (I look back on the incident and I realize that despite the OCD that is problematic enough to require some medication, I can have kids. Because if I can dig through my own shit, I can also dig through the shit of the person that came out of me.) My mother boiled it and soaked it in bleach before she took it to my orthodontist later that summer; the orthodontist was impressed that it had survived the fantastic voyage undamaged.

We have told this story so many times that it became family lore. My father in particular used to tell an elaborated version of it - stunningly clear and detailed despite his not having been there for much of the proceedings - to anyone who would listen and quite a few who would not but were too polite to refuse. I wrote about it for my college applications. I told it at parties. That summer I was known as “the retainer girl.”

But I haven’t thought about what happened in years. Odd how that works.

Superfine Two-Fold.

I often find myself thinking about the clever titles of my friends’ excellent blogs, how they came to be, why they are what they are. Adela’s has always intrigued me because it speaks so neatly to her nature; though I would have put it at seventyfivefold because it seems to me she can balance that many (and more) things in her mind and still come out on and far over the top.

But the idea behind twofold as a material - rather than a theoretical - concept never really hit me until today, when I was folding some laundry I’d left out to dry yesterday. One of these was a shirt belonging to S, and here is what the tag looks like:

It was one of those things that caught me entirely off-guard. “Two-Fold”? What can that possibly mean? How can a shirt be two-fold? A person, and idea, a thought, a word, two-fold, certainly, but a sort of cotton?

Idiot Lianne. Never takes things literally enough.

Voila OED:

And now it makes perfect sense.

As a metaphor (since that is what part of my own project is about) does the concrete meaning of two-fold enrich my abstract idea of twofold?

I came across this fantastic Eliot quote the other day, when I was reading Ramie Targoff’s new book on Donne. Eliot is discussing “A Valediction: forbidding morning” and the last two lines containing the simile of the lovers’ two souls being “like gold to ayery thinnesse beate.” Here is what Eliot has to say:

The figure does not make intelligible an idea, for there is properly no idea until you have the figure; the figure creates the idea - if gold can be beaten out thin, why should not a soul?

I see Eliot’s objection (i.e., a simile is meant to have a pre-existing idea which it then clarifies) but I wonder how far you can stretch the idea of an idea, if you catch my meaning. Because gold being beaten to “ayery thinnesse” is itself an idea, which is to say, have you ever seen gold beat out quite so thinly?

The idea of the soul and the idea of something physical being pressed until so fine are roughly equivalent, at least to my literal mind (and at least according to my own hypotheses concerning the extent to which the early modern soul was a physical entity). Neither of Donne’s ideas is particularly illuminating if you take it as Eliot does, and therein lies, I think, the mistake. Possibly it’s the other way round, and you the reader have a more subtle grasp on the idea of the soul than you do of the beaten gold. Either way, the “ayery thinnesse” applies evenly to both: the soul, or at least the animating force (call it what you will), was matter “to ayery thinnesse beate.”

And now I have wandered very far from my original topic. But now I have a little close reading for myself so perhaps the afternoon has not been fully squandered. Yet.

What a dream I had.

They almost named me Gillian. It was a close call, by all accounts, but it eventually lost to what my name is now.

The other thing they would have liked to call me, which they did, before I was born, was Geedra. “You see,” my father told everyone who asked about my mother’s belly, “it works for either a boy or a girl.”

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened had they named me Geedra. Would I have grown wings, become fifty feet tall, and rampaged downtown Tokyo? It seems that way to me.

Nathaniel Graham, is what they would have named me had I been a boy. My sister would have been Colin something-or-other. Can you imagine that? Nathaniel and Colin, playing outdoors. Nathaniel and Colin, writing a book together. Nathaniel and Colin, not speaking for years because one married the girl the other secretly loved.

The other name was Emily, and this was after the Simon and Garfunkel song, For Emily, whenever I may find her. If you haven’t heard this, while curled under blankets near the fireside, quite alone, alone in a dark empty house, while the wind howls at the snow outside and all beyond your little circle is frigid, frigid and frozen and lost - then you haven’t heard the song at all.

I wonder what it would have been like, to have found that out, had my name been Emily. Then it would have been my song, the song about me and for me, a little prophecy just for their daughter, never minding the hundreds of Emilys who have been named for that song and for other reasons.

Though to tell the truth, I can still hear that song and think it mine. I imagine somewhere out there in the swirling chaos there is another me, named Emily, and this song is the song for us. And by not having been named Emily, but by knowing that I could have been named Emily, it is my song. The song for things that might have been, but weren’t.

I often wonder what I would have turned out like, had I been Gillian, or Geedra, or Nathaniel Graham, or Emily. I like to think I would have been the same, that name holds no burden for the individual. But that can’t possibly have been true.

So instead I just think about the other me, the Emily, somewhere living her life in the myriad voids of the universe. I hope she is well.

Never sleep again.

I guess this kind of thing happens all the time in this city. You can see it every day. Neither is the rest of the world immune to it - though when that much of human nature is crammed into such a small space, the probability of it vastly increases. These are just the sorts of things that happen.

But I was walking home, through the night, through the otherworldly tropical density with the concrete shining and the smell of the steam rising off the streets oppressive and nasty. As I walked I talked on the phone to S, who rightly wants me to do that kind of thing. I passed a storefront, all shuttered up for the night, the awning pulled back; it was right next to the fancy bakery, I think. Though a friend of mine once found a piece of glass in one of their tarts, so how fancy can it be?

In front of the shuttered store - I forget what it usually is during the day - there were bags and bags, and a shopping cart full of more bags. Junk, piled round, more than one person could move or want. Hallmark of the homeless, right? In the middle of this junk there was a woman with dark scraggly hair, huddled against the shutters. I thought she looked about my age.

I saw this as I was walking up Broadway and I thought it was just a bunch of people on the street, having a time, laughing, joking. You see that sort of thing a lot, too. I prefer that.

But as I walked by I could see that woman, huddled there.

Huddled is not the right word. She cowered. Because there was a gang of kids around her, taunting her with money, screaming at her and jeering and more kids yelling from a car in the street, a big new SUV, all screeching and laughing and squawking about here’s some money look she wants forty dollars here take the forty dollars lady take it what’s wrong with you you stupid old cow ha ha she don’t want the money after all.

“What’s going on?” S asked, because he could hear the commotion.

“I’ll tell you in a minute, just let me get away from this.”

“What is it?”

“Just let me keep walking, hang on, I’ll tell you in a minute.”

I kept walking past, had almost got to the next block when the kids’ SUV rolled up north, the kids hanging out the windows, big idiot smiles on their faces.

I told S what had happened. “If you were here,” I said, “I’d have gone back. Hang on. They’re gone. I should go back.”

“I guess you should. Be careful.”

“Here. I’ll call you back in a sec.”

“Take the money out of your wallet first, have it in your hand and put the wallet away, okay?”

I walked over. Possibly this woman was a crackhead nutjob. That’s the sort of thing you’re taught, right? Possibly she would scream at me incomprehensibly. Maybe even knock me down and take my wallet even though I’d put it away.

“Ma’am?” I said. She looked up. She looked old, older than she really was. She was bent over in a little dress with a man’s shirt tossed absently about her shoulders. “I saw what those guys did to you back there. I’m sorry. Could you take this? Please, take this.”

“Oh, no,” she said, squinting at the bill. “I can’t take this. Two dollars I could take, but not twenty.”

“Please, take it, please. Those guys, I can’t believe what those idiot kids did. What awful kids.”

“I just don’t understand,” she said, still waving away the money. “Can you imagine what it would be like if they were in a different neighborhood? Here, this is a nice neighborhood. What if they were in a worse place? Can you imagine?”

“They’re bad enough here,” I said. “Please, take this.”

She looked at the money. She looked at me. “You’re from Columbia, right?”

“Yup.”

“What do you study?”

“English.”

“Ohhhh.” She said this as though I’d just revealed to her the answer to a problem she’d been working through for days. “You English literature people live in a different world.” She said it not in a mean way. More like she was marveling at this fable about people who lived in a magical far-off kingdom and rode horses and hung out with knights in castles.

I chuckled. “Kind of. Seems like it. I try not to stay there too long. I’m trying to get out.”

“But it’s a different world you’re in. Not, like, not sociology, or something. Because this place, this neighborhood, these kids. Can you imagine?”

“It’s bad times in this country. It’s awful. I wish things were better. I’m sorry. Please, please take this.”

“No, really, no.” She wasn’t going to take it. Columbia students didn’t have deep pockets, she said. Well that’s not right, I wanted to tell her, most of them, you should see it, I’m just a grad student. But then I thought she’d be even less likely to take the money.

“I can’t believe it, I just wanted to say I’m sorry. People aren’t like that where I’m from,” I said. Which is true.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“Minnesota.”

“Oh, yes, yes. The people there, they’re still pure, they’re still like that, aren’t they?” Again like a revelation, like a looking-in at a fabulous kingdom.

I chuckled again. “I think so. Every time I go back–”

“Back to Minnesota?” Like a talisman, that word. I wondered if I should tell her how much bigger the sky was there.

“Yeah, every time I go back to Minnesota I think how different it is from here.”

“They’re purer there, they’re still pure. Harsh, harsh winters, and I went there once or twice in the summer, and that was hard, too, but really beautiful.”

“It is a lot different from here. No stupid kids, nothing like that. Stupid kids.” I guess that wasn’t entirely true. At least you didn’t see the stupid kids with their big idiot grins yelling all the time. Or at least not so often. “I’m so sorry.”

“Well, this country, it’s a mess. And this city especially, with the mayor, and the politicians, they’re just making things worse.”

I snorted. Tell it, I wanted to say. No way was she going to take the money, so I fished out the only other change I had, which turned out to be only three dollars.

“Would you take this?” I asked. “It would make me feel better. Please.”

She squinted again at the money. Wouldn’t take it. I begged her further, then put it down next to her and that seemed to be all right. We chatted a little longer.

“You have a good night,” I said. How the hell can you have a good night? I wondered. “I’m sorry about those kids. Stupid kids. I hope things are better.” I put out my hand.

“Oh, no,” she said, “don’t, my hand is wet.” I thought of Gloucester and Lear.

But I took it anyways, and we shook and said good night. I waited until I got a block away before I called S again. When I told him what I’d done, how she was just a sweet old lady and how awful those kids were and I couldn’t believe it, I got choked up. Just a bit. I sighed.

“You did a good thing. And she was happy to chat,” said S.

“I know,” I said, “I know.” I thought about feeling glad, about feeling like I’d done something good and helped someone out. But it all felt too big. And this, it felt like nothing at all.

“You had a choice,” he continued. “Your choice was either to walk away and do nothing, or to do something. You did something. You’re not going to change everything, all at once, you just can’t, but you can do something, right?”

“Right,” I said.

I thought about this for a while when I got home and cleaned up. I could still feel the woman’s soft small hand pressed to mine. I wondered if I should have asked her name. I wondered if I’d ever see her again. It felt like that hand was dirty, heavy, like I’d stuck it down some hole into some muck. Not because of the woman. No, not because of her. But those kids. Because of those kids, and the way they’d laughed, and how the woman had cowered, trying to hide her face, but they’d stuck their hands up right in front of her. I thought about them driving away, sneering. How crappy I’d figured the lives of kids like them must be when I heard them being rowdy on the subway, as if that were an excuse, as if I were trying to say “Kids will be kids” but it came out wrong because of what I looked like and because of where I was in life.

But that wasn’t it. Not at all. Things like this - they just happen.