The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, October 14, 2024

Notably: When my mother died in November 2013, four days before my 49th (she had done a far better job raising me than I had caring for her as Alzheimer’s or Pick’s disease or whatever cruelty waterboarded her for the last decade and a half of her by-then-so-called life) it was, as such things so often are, an occasion for my closest family members to reunite. Our mother had spent most of her dying years in Palm Coast, and died in the den in our house in the P Section, a house that was in large part hers really, so it was natural that everyone converge on Palm Coast, of all places, after all of us had lived more substantial parts of our lives on other continents, in New York, in Chicago and Texas (my cousin Philippe), or Montreal (my cousin Danielle). Even my older brother managed to make it all the way from Brunei. The resurrecting consolation of the gathering aside, probably the most important thing we did, or that my middle brother Robert–always the most giving of us three of Monique’s boys–did, was buy a few trees: an olive tree, a citrus tree, and an oak. The oak, we all called the Nonna Tree, in my mother’s memory (ironic as that always seems): she had been Nonna to our children, as her mother had been Nonna to us–the two or three drops of Italian blood in the family granting us the right to the honorific. I’d long imagined the Italian thing more aspiration than reality–more of our casual (and in retrospect shameful) bigotry against any association with our Arab blood, but a DNA test revealed it to be more accurate than we knew–that, and a good deal of Ashkenazi Jewish blood on top of it, at least in me.  The citrus tree I proceeded to assassinate over time, as I have done almost every tree planted in my yard, including a beautiful Lebanese cedar gifted me after a lecture I gave to a group in Volusia County eons ago. I’d left the sapling cedar unprotected from deer, who gnawed and gnawed until it might as well have been the toy thing of Israeli shrapnel. But the young oak grew, and grew, and grew. Magnificently, awesomely, and so rapidly. This year it had risen higher than the roof of our two-story house. But Hurricane Matthew had done a job on it, and tilted it south-southeast enough that I worried whether it could withstand bending over like that much longer. Then came Hurricane Milton. You can see the Nonna Tree above, exactly a year ago in the picture to the left, and on Sunday. Taller, but also more more Pisa-like, as if the Nonna Tree were branching toward its Italian lineage. The damage to our roof, which will require a $16,000 or $18,000 replacement, is a much smaller hit than to see the Nonna Tree dying its own premature death. We will be contacting a couple of tree nurseries to explore open-bark surgeries if need be. Or (given our household’s habits) radiation therapy. Who knows. Maybe we can get it right yet. As for the Olive tree, I clobbered that one into the ground too, but as you well know olive trees are damn near indestructible–Israeli settlers notwithstanding–and this one has simply sprung a new skyward branch that’s slowly becoming its main trunk. It’s like an olive branch to my Mediterranean ancestry, or a companion to the Nonna Tree. If whales communicate, I have no doubt that trees exult. We simply have not yet learned to hear their bark or read their leaves.

—P.T.

 

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I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.

Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.

Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.

I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.

I come from there.
I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.

And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.

I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.

I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland.

—Mahmoud Darwish, “I Come From There”

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