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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
Week of May 15, 2005
Family history published
as a WIP dated August 7, 2001
© 2001 by Bud Grossmann. All Rights Reserved.
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White Ginger (Bud & Blossoms), 2005
© 2005 by Bud Grossmann
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A SCENT SO SWEET
On August 5, 2000, one of my dearest friends in all the world, Mary Liz Carlmark, died at the age of eighty-nine. On August 7, one year ago today, my only son passed away. David had lived nearly nineteen years. Dave and Mary Liz had each struggled with illness for a good long while, so the deaths were no surprise. Even so, I felt as if someone had slammed me in the chest with a two-by-four. Even now I sometimes go numb and empty with grief and disbelief.
August 5th, August 7th. Night followed day, day followed night. Tears, fears, and telephone calls. Flowers and funerals. Condolences, casseroles, thank-you notes. Dream-filled, unsatisfying sleep. Short tempers, misplaced blame, silences. Laughter, platitudes, gratitude. Prayer. Day followed night. Life’s routines resumed.
In the first week of September, my wife asked me to go to a city rec center not far from our home in Hawaii Kai, to sign up our twelve-year-old daughter for a tennis class. Many activities were offered, not just tennis, and so a long line had formed before the scheduled sign-up time of six o’clock p.m. The line was mostly moms and little kids; it extended from the locked doors of the rec center office and out along a covered sidewalk that ran between activity rooms and a grassy courtyard.
Parents cheerfully chatted while children chased one another across the lawn. Thick columns supporting the rec center roof obscured my view of some of the folks ahead of me, but, in any case, I saw no neighbors I knew by name. I greeted no one. I simply stood in line, lost in melancholy thoughts, holding my daughter’s registration form and a filled-in check for her fees.
Suddenly, a terrible roar of maternal anguish rose out of the crowd ahead of me. Moms moaned and moved. Some surged forward, as if to rescue someone, while others grabbed their children and roughly tugged them out onto the grass. A toddler shrieked and wailed.
Two possibilities came into my mind. One was that perhaps a rat had bitten a child. The other was that a pit bull terrier was gnawing human bones.
A gray-haired dad, one of those fellows serving a second term as a family man, sprinted across the courtyard and plucked the screaming child from the center of the frenzied mob and whispered comforting words into his little boy’s ear.
Soft laughter and a murmur of relief replaced the screaming and the moans. Witnesses and bystanders furnished a description of what had happened: the kid had picked up a centipede, long and leggy but limp and lifeless. The boy had not been stung.
Throughout this commotion—I suppose as much as thirty seconds had gone by—I stood my ground, serene and uninvolved. Someone will take care of this, I thought.
A rat bite, a dog attack, that’s not so terribly bad. Someone will take care of it. Whatever is happening, I reasoned, it cannot be much worse than the death of my own child. I’ve made it through a month; I think I’m going to be okay.
That story may not seem quite as uplifting as you deserve. Please allow me to tell another.
White ginger is one of my favorite flowers. One day, a few Junes ago, I admired a patch of that plant in a friend’s yard in Kaneohe. “Take some,” said the friend. He brought out a machete and hacked off a hunk of root adorned with several soft green shoots, put the clump in a cardboard box, and gave it to me.
I took the gift home, dug a shallow hole in the shade of a plumeria tree, placed my ginger root into the earth, and watered it well. I fenced it off with some little logs of monkeypod to keep out Chester the Dog. I am not a gardener, but I had hopes.
My wife, Frances, took a look. “It needs sun,” she said. “You’re not going to get any blossoms.”
Well, she was right, as Frances often is. She was right for several years. I got shoots and stalks, but flowers didn’t come. Until now, that is. Last week, the tallest stalk, about two feet from the ground, produced a good green knob at the top, with several buds poking up, like tiny, hand-rolled cigarettes.
On Sunday, a year to the day from the date Mary Liz departed to another world, I went out to my ginger and found that one of those buds had unfurled to form something like a butterfly of purest white, with a scent so soft and sweet that it almost made me dizzy.
On Monday, the single blossom dried and drooped.
Today, Tuesday, August 7th, a new blossom, a new perfect butterfly, came forth in honor of my son. It will not last for long, I know. But that’s all right with me. I’ll enjoy it while it’s here.
I have made it through a year, and I think I’m going to be okay.
♦
See a list of other
Words of the Week
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Thanks! BUD GROSSMANN
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