Ohiodave

Bonsai

When I was in college, I owned a bonsai tree. I like trees, and I like miniature versions of things, so this seemed like a natural choice of hobby. My bonsai wasn’t a miniature spruce like the one here, or a tiny grove of birches like you see in the the best Japanese gardens, but some kind of dwarf shrub with fat glossy leaves. I bought it because it was easy to take care of.

Bonsai is supposed to be an exercise of patience and perseverance, as you train a sapling to look like an ancient, full-sized tree that fits on your windowsill. My tree came “pre-trained”, which means that somebody else had already spent a few years contorting it into an interesting curved shape. I had no plans to continue my bonsai tree’s training. I was supposed to bind and wire the branches to make the tree loop back on itself again and again, but that seemed like too much work. All I ever did was prune the upper leaves when the tree started to look like an unruly Chia-Pet.

I was in college at the time, and suddenly I had a living thing to worry about. When my parents came to get me for school breaks, the tree rode home in the car. After a while I decided it was easier to fly or take the train home, and it became harder to take the plant with me. One winter I left the tree at my parents’ house between New Year’s and Spring Break, which was in February for some reason. I left my brother instructions to water it every couple of days and keep feeding it Miracle-Gro, which I believed to be a substitute for actual plant-care skills.

I came home six weeks later and found the tree’s desiccated corpse sitting on the kitchen table. There was a single green leaf left on an upper branch, a lone holdout who hadn’t heard the declaration of surrender. My parents told me they’d found it in my brother’s room a few days before. He had forgotten all about it.

We tried hard to save the plant. We pruned back dead branches until the tree looked like a bundle of woody straws. We doused it with water and pierced the soil with enough Miracle-Gro to raise the dead, but finally the last green leaf shrivelled and fell, and the bonsai went in the trash.

I gve my brother a lot of crap about this over the years, but in a way it was a relief. Now at least I could go on trips again without having to worry about who was going to water my plant. My first taste of responsibility was a failure, but at least I didn’t have to give it a funeral.