fig

apartment saturday. brooklyn saturday. the sweetie has to work today but we are close enough to the rest of the world we can walk to our favorite diner before he leaves by going one block down and one block over. it is early and the booths are mostly empty. our waitress has not seen us since labor day and asks about the house, the yard. she is a gardener. the diner always has little pots of freshly rooting plants- avocado trees and figs. her handiwork. we visit a bit and then eat. as we get ready to leave, she brings us a tiny tree, maybe a foot or so tall, with four soft green teddybearish leaves on it. the rest of the plant is twiggy, barky, with small roots snaking off near the top of the soil. she offers us the tree, which turns out to be a fig, with the hope we have a place to plant it upstate.

now, i know the sweetie and i know me. we love to garden but our recent attempts to understand the rocky, acidic, shady and often frozen upstate land we own have not been what you'd call consistently good. but there is a fig tree on our table sitting right next to a fork and my teacup and already i love it so much i can't even think straight. i will raise it in the apartment, in the pot, where it will be safe. i tell our waitress about walking home from school through bensonhurst neighborhoods thick with fig trees, wanting to sneak away with a fig or with a cutting. but most trees don't just root from cuttings like violets do and i imagined horrifying beauty and the beastish scenes where some crazed bensonhurst fig tree owner would come barreling out of his house to capture me and how guthrie would somehow end up taking my place, watching me suffer at home through the lens of a magic crystal ball. and i could never quite get up the nerve. she hears my plan and laughs because that's exactly where my little fig came from. she snipped a cutting from a tree while walking through bensonhurst and rooted the thing.

after breakfast the sweetie heads off toward the train and manhattan and work. i walk through not quite awake streets, past gated stores with my fig tree clutched against my chest, its leaves fluttering against my cheek. later today guthrie and i will go to the garden store and get some soil and a new clay pot for the tree but for now, i'm thinking about names.

it seems to me that some plants, just like animals and babies, tend to be more robust if you give them names. i doubt what the name is matters to the plant any more than it does to animals or babies. it is having the name that seems to make a difference. it suggests care and concern. for quite a few years i had an avocado tree named andre and when i had to move and couldn't cram him (her?) into the tiny rental car along with every other object i considered mine, a friend offered to keep him. he moved the plant from apartment to apartment (i am convinced because the plant had a name) until a fire in his building late at night claimed the poor avocado tree. when i spoke to him next he cried, "andre was killed in a fire!"

i am not so good with plant names. i once had a violet named violet. i am pretty sure our ancient rose bush is rosie. there was code orange the orange tree (an already hilariously named gift) and the most recent, a tragic lime tree named limon. the current lemon tree is nameless because of its whimsical attitude toward living. i am trying to avoid attachment until it commits to being consistently alive but am reconsidering. it may be that the attitude comes from the lack of name. maybe lemony, after lemony snickett and his horrible, funny books. see what i mean.

but this fig tree wants a name. and i know what will happen. i will name it fig newton. or figgy pudding. or fig fig sputnik. figgy stardust. but it deserves better. i could go with one of the names my sister and brother-in-law rejected for their child. nascar astronaut. obadiah. perhaps simply adam, with a nod to the pictures in my childhood sunday school papers of the scantily clad namer of all animals. but i would welcome suggestions. any sort of help. a name you wanted to name your boy child until you had a series of girls. a name you thought would be great for your next dog until you found out you're not just allergic to flowers. the name of the car you drove in high school. suggest them here. you don't want to spend the rest of your life with the guilt of knowing you could have prevented a name like fig newton. you really don't.