Are you my mother?

I was thinking today about my 6th grade history day project. I had moved to Fresno only recently, and my friendship situation was tenuous at best. For some reason, I wasn't partners with my, uh, best friend Brooke (we were really only best friends about 20% of the time that year), and instead did some sort of a tri-fold butcher paper-covered wooden board with Jennifer Shapiro, half of Jennifer and Julie, twins with unruly curly hair and the same sturdy walk.

Our teacher, the cranky and short Mrs. Folcarelli, had two daughters in college, and one came to visit the classroom one day. This happened to be the day that Jennifer and I were trying to think of a topic for some deep, twelve-year old analysis, and were probably considering specific things like "The Civil War: Why did it happen?" and "Slavery: It was bad." Apparently the history day board required a colon in the title, the better to draw in the interested onlooker (read: parent) who would wander into the cafeteria and learn something deep and profound about . . . wait for it . . . history. Maybe of humankind, maybe of America - who really knows. If it was in the past, it was fair game.

So Mrs. Folcarelli's daughter suggested something entirely accessible called Turner's Thesis, a concept which I had to just now Google to even remember what it was about, though I am certain that it reappeared later through the leathered, tobacco-stained lips of Mr. Rumley and was probably an important question on the AP US History test I managed to pass. The thesis, it turns out, is an essay entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," written in 1893 by Frederick Jackson Turner. It is essentially his impassioned claim that Westward expansion was the way for the colonists to truly escape leftover Europeanism, and was the vehicle for the new Americans to be truly free. The theory wasn't altogether well-received at the time and probably has many well-documented inherent flaws I'm not now inclined to analyze.

But when I was twelve, I thought it bold and grownup to title our project "Turner's Thesis: What Went Wrong?" We spent the better part of our time together creating die-cut letters (which, it turned out, didn't fit right on the board and required some creative and hideous diagonal positioning), and, I hate to say it, splatter-painting the whole thing, the worst Pollock impression 1988 saw, blue on the yellow letters, yellow on the blue background. I'm quite sure we had no idea what went wrong or right in that theory; I'm quite sure our research was limited to the encyclopedia and the regurgitation of American Civ 101 Mrs. Folcarelli's daughter dumped on us that day. We didn't win the competition part of History Day, needless to say, and I suspect Mrs. Folcarelli gave us a passing grade only because of pride in her daughter's vast influence.

I tell this long story because I was thinking, gratefully, about how the illusion of authority gets demystified when you become a grownup. I remember how I felt that day, "discussing" such a presumably important and innovative historical topic with this smart college girl, when in fact she probably had about the same amount knowledge of Turner's blasted thesis than I just learned in my 5-minute Google search. I might be inventing history with my cynicism, but I am quite certain a decently experienced student wouldn't inflict that kind of arrogance on 12-year old kids looking for something that looks good with splatter paint on a board. She was, for us, the authority on Turner, and however unoriginal or recycled or incomplete her speech, we believed her to be right.

I certainly don't have issues with authority per se, just the illusory kind, which presumes its subjects dumber and more lowly. I am quite certain we all behave, on occasion, as if we were the supreme possessor of knowledge, but it doesn't mean we're right. And sometimes, despite our knowing this full well, we still get tricked by the fake smarties.

My friend Ashley recently had her résumé redone by a supposed authority - the VP of HR at the now-defunct company for which she worked briefly. It turns out that a terrifically kind man at another company (which should really hire her right now) informed her, in a nice way, that the résumé was a piece of crap, and nobody would hire her based on its rambling, text-heavy mess. These people, in their attempts to be generous and smart, weren't actually that smart after all.

Then again, maybe she should have done a little splatter painting on the thing. I hear it hides those mistakes pretty well.

Bienvenue au printemps

[In which she attempts anything but the war.]

Snow on the mountain--water in
the valley; you beat a mule and
it works hard, Honey.

-William Stafford, from "A Song in the Manner of Flannery O'Connor"

It's no secret that I am always in love with flowers. But I have a special kind of love for the flowering trees that appear, kind of cat-like, when I least expect them. I swear the blooming of this year is the only thing keeping my head from exploding.

So I love to see the flowering pear, with its rotund body coming to a graceful point. It's surely the boldest of the flowerers, coming out with its little puffs of white accompanied by just a smattering of green, smelling to high heaven at first like spring and then vaguely like rotting compost. You want to love it the best, but the green creeps in too quickly, and looks mottled partway through its vanity.

It signals in the forsythia, the most perfect of the ugly bushes: brown unruly sticks for most of the year, boring and oddly-shaped with foliage the rest. But for a lovely few weeks in March, it is covered with bright yellow bursts of seduction, no leaves in sight, screaming to be the loudest of the first bloomers. It sings to me like a siren; I am always lulled into post-winter happiness.

But I love no one so much as the redbud, a tree whose acquaintance I did not have the pleasure of making until my fortuitous move to Chapel Hill, whose planners lined the main of only two roads that connect anything to anything with them. Each day they woo me with their emerging flowers, not red at all, but a rich and understated shade of purple. Their branches aren't pudgy, like the pear's, but long and pointy like a supermodel's fingers holding a delicate glass of crystal; they just barely touch the air. They're marvelous.

Happily, when the redbud starts to wane, out creeps the dogwood, a tree belonging to the South, and aptly so. Its white, perfectly 4-pointed flowers are tricky, appearing first as greenish buds the color of cooked brussels sprouts, giving no indication of the love to come. The branches are nature's ballerina, arms held as if suspended by gossamer strings. Scattered among the deciduous trees just squeezing out their first green buds, the dogwood performs Swan Lake on the decaying underbrush.

I have a love affair with the aesthetics of Spring; the extra minutes of sunshine and sudden green are lovely like my other secret pleasures: Nina Totenburg's fluid voice, the chunky paint on a Van Gogh, the shuffly background noise on public radio's airwaves, the first sip of Diet Coke from a sweaty cold can, the watermelon smell of freshly-cut grass, the abrupt halt of a tuning orchestra when the conductor arrives. Thank heaven above for senses -- they may be the things that keep us sane.