Every Blade of Grass

I just remembered something today. When Mom visited me in Senegal (many, many moons ago) we stayed at the house of a friend and the house had a beautiful tree in the yard. Mom would sit out on the patio, smoke her cigarettes and marvel at this tree. Some people can identify every growing thing they see by its Latin name. She knew the names of flowers she planted every year, perhaps because of their little plastic name tags stuck in the dirt they come in. Otherwise, Mom described growing things as purple and fuzzy or bushy with little yellow leaves, like I do now.

So neither of us could tell you what kind of tree this was that we admired in the yard, except to say that it was tall and broad and had flat green leaves and, "Hey, you know what? Isn't this? This is a great big version of that little plant I keep trying not to kill in the living room. You know which one I mean?" And I did. It was maybe two feet tall and scrawny and was a runner-up for the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. "I'm gonna take a picture of this tree," she said. "I want to show my little plant back home what it can become." And she did, too. She actually took a picture of the big beautiful tree, went eight thousand miles home and lovingly showed it to her dinky little nothing of a plant in the living room.

That's exactly what she did with us. She quietly believed in us, told us she loved us, told us we were smart and beautiful and funny and good. In so many words, even. You're such a good kid, she'd say. Even when we were dinky and withering away in the living room. Somewhere inside her was a picture of each of us that showed us to be tall and broad and beautiful and grounded deeply in the roots of her. And every time she looked at us, laughed at our stupid jokes, listened to our stories, watched us tap dance, endured our clarinet practices--we saw a piece of that picture she was holding up. We heard her whispering, look what you can become.

Every blade of grass has its angel which bends over it and whispers "Grow, grow." --the Talmud