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Under the Baobab Tree Under the Baobab Tree: April 2002

Monday, April 22, 2002


On Being Four


I sat down to write more about being four years old this evening:


  • I remember thinking the bus ride to school was so long and that we were going so far away from home. I never really had anyone to sit with on the bus -- there were bus politics about which I was unaware. I remember some strange kids who waited at the bus stop with us. And the bus stop was under a mulberry tree. Now I realize the school was pretty much just on the other side of a little itty bitty hill. Oh well.

  • I remember the day we learned the letter "u" in kindergarten. The teacher's aide thought we couldn't hear her (even though she was standing two feet in front of us) and she turned to the real teacher and laughed and said, "They think it's an upside down 'n'!" I remember thinking the teacher's aide was totally wrong and we didn't think it was an upside down "n," it was a "u." Duh.

  • I remember the first time I did something wrong in kindergarten. We had these pieces of paper with a word in a column in the middle and two pictures on either side of the word. We had to color the picture that represented the word. I got carried away and colored both pictures. I was mortified.

  • I remember one day I left my sweater at school and Mom drove me back there to get it. I had to go into the classroom which was full of the kids in the afternoon session and get my sweater out of the closet. I thought I was going to die. Some lady was very nice to me (couldn't' have been the idiotic teacher's aide). I remember thinking Mom had clearly decided to teach me a lesson about losing things, because she stayed in the car and didn't come in and help me. Upon reflection, she probably just didn't want to have to park the car.

  • I remember one day I came home from school and Mom had gone clothes shopping and had bought me all of these really cool new clothes. She had them all arranged on the couch for my viewing pleasure. I tried them all on. I think that was when I acquired the yellow nightgown with flowers on it that I would own for years through our time in Lisbon.

  • I remember peeking out my bedroom door when my parents watched Monty Python's Flying Circus and 60 Minutes (this was 1974). Every time I hear the 60 minutes stopwatch, even now, I think of Takoma Park.

  • I remember always knowing that we had come from Africa and I think I remember being able to point to where Durban was on that old map of ancient Africa that Dad has.

  • I remember Dad's 29th birthday. We were singing Happy Birthday in the kitchen and he climbed out of the basement.

  • I remember learning the words "Bom Dia" and "Obrigada" when we were getting ready to move to Lisbon. I remember thinking "obrigada" was the weirdest word and that I would never get used to it.

  • I remember learning how to ride my bike and how Wes would try to make me wreck on the street. Once he finally succeeded and he got so mad because although I did wreck, I didn't really hurt myself and just kept going.

  • I remember one day I came home from school and couldn't find my mother anywhere and I was convinced she was lost. I'm not sure how I got home from school alone -- we had stood on the giant (i.e., minuscule) hill near the kindergarten entrance and waited and waited and waited. Maybe someone else drove us home? Was there a bus? Anyway, I tore through the house looking everywhere for her and it turned out she was just in the basement.

  • I remember my mother would serve us big glasses of milk out of the blue glasses she still has.

  • I remember one day a bird smashed into the window near the piano and died. Oddly enough, I think I had been standing there staring at the window before the bird smashed into it, and then the bird smashed into it and I thought, "well!" We went outside to look and that's when my mother taught me to sing White Coral Bells . . . (this is probably not really how it happened but it seemed that way).

  • I remember trailing around after my father and brother in Rock Creek Park. It was always exhausting. I remember I recently found one of the little "beaches" that we used to take our dog Duffy to for runs. That was cool.

  • I remember learning to tie shoelaces on a big green felt football. I think on the same night I was learning to read the word "hospital" which was really long and I kept messing it up and laughing really hard and my mother didn't think it was all that funny. Apparently she thought I ought to remember somehow that the big long word I didn't know was "hospital."

  • I remember Dad teaching us how to do hand-stands in the basement. There was an old mattress under the stairs that we used to bounce and rough-house on. Dad also did that thing where he could hold himself up on his hands. I thought that was really cool.

  • I remember when we left Takoma Park and moved to Lisbon, how Grandma & Grandpa came to Dulles with us and stayed at the Marriott overnight the night before. I remember I didn't realize they weren't coming with us to Lisbon until they didn't get on the People Mover with us. I didn't understand why they were on the other side of the door. NO-ONE HAD TOLD ME!


posted by Anonymous @ 8:11 PM 0 comments

Saturday, April 13, 2002



The Wilds of Montgomery County

With the next trip to San Fran postponed for three weeks, the travel diary juices are nonetheless flowing. And today I traveled in the Greater Metropolitan Area, and I find I have some small items to share:

First stop was the Salvation Army in Greater Bladensburg. I miserable town, but the only place to drop-off unwanted household items on a weekend with a car. I was met but a suspiciosly jolly porter, who lugged my cast-off clothing out of my car and let me write my own receipt. He asked me if I was planning to spend the day on the couch watching sports. ? I said no.

My next planned stop was Lake Needwood. Don't you know where that is? It is, of course, in Northeast Rockville. I decided to try to find it because I have a dim memory of being about 4 years old and drifting lazily on a warm sunny day in a rowboat with my mother, on a calm green lake surrounded by Eastern Woodlands, possibly fishing for tiger muskie. Ahead was a deserted island, covered in oaks and tulip trees and giant rhododendron, complete with sandy embankments and turtles. We landed on it and in my memory, we explored the island wilderness for hours, snapping ferns, upending turtles and digging in the sand. I recently interrogated my mother about where this wonderful wilderness was (thinking she would say North Carolina, or Cape Cod, or Maine (though I have never been to Maine)), and she totally surprised me by saying Northeast Rockville. She was a cub scout den mother at the time, circa 1976, and one of my brother's den outings was, it seems, boating.

The trip from Greater Bladensburg to Lake Needwood was less than easy. I avoided the Beltway because there was bad traffic. Instead, I journeyed from east to west through rural Silver Spring, through urban Silver Spring, past my old kindergarten in Takoma Park, past the body shop that fixed my car, past the ethnic restaurant strip in Wheaton, and finally (after many wrong turns) onto the road from Rockville Pike into Rock Creek Park and Lake Needwood. Suddenly I was in horse/golf/plastic flamingo country. It was dark and raining. The road was curvy. There were lots of osage orange trees (which have a habit of masquerading as mulberry trees in the summer, but in the spring are easily identified), thornapples and white pines.
I arrived at Lake Needwood to find a small pond, not a wilderness lake, with a very small island, an islet really, about 100 yards from shore. I read the extensive instructions about how to fish for tiger muskie. I observed the abandoned boathouse, and the sign advertising that they needed a volunteer deck-hand. Some geese with strep throat squawked nearby, and some die hard fisherman stood listlessly about, encased completely in rubber clothes.

It turns out that Lake Needwood really is much smaller than when I was four. It is a man-made lake behind an earthen dam that was build in the 1960s to trap sediment flowing into the main branch of Rock Creek. The Army Corps of Engineers expects the lake to completely silt up in the next several decades, and become either a marsh or swamp - apparently there is disagreement about which. This rapid in-fill is the result of erosion and run-off from nearby, hideous Rockville/Wheaton developments. When I was four, the lake probably was in the hinterland, just as I remember it.

On the way back home I passed the Boy Scouts of America headquarters where I remember spending endless hours in the parking lot, waiting for my mother to do whatever den mothers do in there. Buying patches, maybe? Or little cub scout emblems? I don't remember ever going inside that building. When I was four, it was always raining at the Boy Scouts of America. The fact that I never remember going inside is curious, because as it happens, my brother's cub scout den elected me their Den President, also when I was four (four was a big year for me, it seems). The little cub scouts didn't seem to know that: a) girls weren't allowed, and b) even if they were, I didn't happen to be a cub scout at that particular moment. Also, I was four, which must surely have disqualified me. I think my brother was kind of peeved that I was elected (vague, ill-formed childhood instinct). My mother ordered a new election, and my brother won.

I drove straight from the Boy Scouts of America to my parent's house to further interrogate my mother about these dim childhood memories. First up - where did I go to nursery school anyway? It was HIGH on a hill, with very dark scary woods going down a near vertical cliff, and during recess I tried very hard not to fall down the vertical cliff because I was afraid of getting poked by the tops of the trees, which I could see. Avoiding this required Full Concentration and was Extremely Exhausting.


I think my nursery school uniform was my red coat because my only nursery school memories involve taking off my red coat (with relief after successfully avoiding falling off the scary cliff), putting it somewhere, and then trying to find it again once the teacher said it was time to go home. I also remember learning to write my name. It was very easy, since my name only has three letters, so instead my greatest challenge was trying to get the three letters to stretch all the way across the top of my crayon drawings. Only later did someone tell me that this was NOT THE POINT.

This treacherous and tiring nursery school turns out to have been on New Hampshire Avenue - not exactly the wooded alpine slopes.

Lastly, I asked my mother about a huge forest of sweet gum trees and sycamores somewhere in Montgomery County that had wonderous, fantastical playthings in it like a gigantic rocket that kids could climp inside and magnificent suspended tunnel in the air made out of something very wobbly. I am not making this up. I explained all this to my mother with a straight face (over a gin and tonic), and she said a little bell was ringing faintly in the back of her head. She too, it turns out, remembers the Forest of Fantasy. We're still not sure where it was. Current best estimates are Sligo Creek somewhere.

Finding that will be next weekend's adventure.

posted by Anonymous @ 9:19 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, April 09, 2002


Toxic Cleanup

In my continuing campaign to rid my life of toxic people, I have reached the following conclusions:

1. I have shockingly little patience with women who are genuinely distraught over their single status and can think/talk of little else but how to get a man. (N.B., not to be confused under any circumstances with our ribald humor/merriment/incomprehension/ridicule re our single status).

2. I have even less patience for people who are totally unable to fend for themselves or generate an independent thought, whether it be on topics such as "what shall I do this weekend" (people actually ask me that. response: whatever you'd like to do.) or "I'm hiring a new secretary - what should I ask her in the interview?" (I got that one this morning. response: whatever you'd like to know about her), or "does the library have such and such a book?" (response: ask the library).

3. I do not wish to be the cruise director for my vast number of social acquaintances. "Keep me in mind if you're doing anything fun" is a sure way to kill a friendship. Or, "Call me if you'd like to come over to my house for dinner sometime and let me know who would be fun to invite." That one is tricky - it masquerades as an invitation but it in fact puts all the planning and organizational onus on you, which does not make the invitee feel like a "pampered guest."


4. Beware of the polite inquiry which is really an effort to drag the answeree into a defense of the inquiring party's personality. To wit: "how're you doing?" Unwitting dragee responds, "good, and you?" To which inquiring party responds with something like: "Oh I'm doing pretty well for me but probably not as good as you because my job is SOOO much more stressful and difficult and my clients are SOO much nastier, you'll see when you get to be my age." Dragee is left wondering what ever lead her to participate in this conversation.


5. I can't abide people who don't read the newspaper or listen to NPR or make some effort to "keep abreast" of local happenings. Then they ask "how did you know about that book fair?" Might as well walk around with a bag on your head. Related is the person who says she refuses to attend a certain meeting because she's not interested, and then conducts a detailed examination of you afterwards to learn "everything that happened."

6. If you have no idea who Proust is, or if you've never heard of the Iliad, I may have a hard time being your friend. You need not have read either (I haven't read more than the first 100 pages of Proust - enough to get the madeleine part down), but you must be sufficiently knowledgeable about major pieces of world literature so as not to make yourself a crashing bore. I'm growing more and more fond of our various secondary institutions that drilled "cocktail party learning" into our heads. Here here! (or is it hear hear?) It is possible to make up for lack of basic, superficial knowledge of the classics with other skills. You will receive points for willingness to learn.

7. If none of your major body parts move when someone at the table says something stupendously stupid, you may need to rethink being my friend.

8. People who lack taste buds (literally - I know some such people) are by definition, toxic.

This list will likely grow.

I was inspired to prepare it because I read M.F.K. Fisher's A to Z, An Alphabet for Gourmets, on the plane up to NYC and back yesterday and this a.m., and she says she refuses repeat invitations with people who don't figure out within the first 10 minutes or so that she is unlikely to want a glass of Muscatel. Her precise words were:



"Only once did a professional bachelor ever offer me a glass of sweet liqueur. I never saw him again, feeling that his perceptions were too dull for me to exhaust myself, if after even the short time needed to win my acceptance of his dinner invitation he had not guessed my tastes that far."






posted by Anonymous @ 8:48 PM 0 comments