Monday, August 30, 2010
Fructification
Rosh HaShona is a-coming down the pike, which is to say, down the pike down which all major jewish holidays come. It celebrates rebirth, and its symbol is an apple. Puts me in mind of something....
“Hey - we got apples!”
L’s childlike glee was understandable. First, she’s 11 years old, and very much a child in some ways; second, her discovery had just made her new home a little more interesting and welcoming. It was a juvenile tree - still slim-trunked with plenty of breeze between its sturdy little boughs, but nonetheless in vigorous leaf with dozens of blushing globes hanging all over it. Her brother, 13 and conmmensurately jaded, feigned disdain but I saw through that. Finding a fruit tree - a legendary type of fruit tree, no less, a veritable tree of knoweledge - fructifying in their new backard was, at a minimum, a pretty good sign.
I could understand how they’d missed it previously. They had barely taken up permanent residence there, stilll flitting back and forth between the home where they’d grown up 500 miles away, and this new world where they’d just recently landed. Certainly they’d been at the new house long enough to have grown to appreciate some of its quirks and secrets, but there was much more to learn:
The secret clubhouse, the hobbit closets, the looming tower, the individually-wrought guard rails lining balconies with 270-degree, two-bridge views, the ghosts hiding in the hundred-year-old bricks that rise up in broad courses from the street to the heavy handcarved front door, the downstairs party room with its black-out shades and decoupaged powder room..... At this plaster castle towering above its hillside neighborhood, there was much for an 11-year-old girl to discover, and an apple tree on the flagstone path by the pool deck was only one more charmed artifact in a magical mansion. But as I watched her delighted eyes and careful fingers familiarize themsleves with the little apples on the little tree, the magic I saw at work was simple regeneration.
In 1991 I had been brunching with an unruly mob of likeminded friends, the sort of sprawling, rolling feast for which for years I lived. In a squalid little shack near USF we were eating and drinking ourselves one day into a blissful stupor, careless of any trouble or woe - until we noticed a wall of smoke had eaten half the sky. The east bay hills were ablaze. Ancient turpentine pines, stands of unctuous, ill-considered gum trees, groves of gnarly old oak and hillsidesful of century-old homes were consumed in flames and thousand-foot sheets of thick black smoke that stretched for miles across the horizon.
From way out in Frisco it looked impressive. I imagine that at closer range it simply looked like hell. By the time the embers cooled, 1500 acres had been reduced to cinders, with nothing left but the odd bit of masonry or paving stone to show where 4,000 homes once stood.
Many of the neighborhoods rendered that day to smoldering waste were in really good zip codes. One such neighborhood, boasting proximity to trendy shops, BART lines, freeways and good schools - none of which were affected by the firestorm - was rebuilt with particular attention to detail. Grand new houses soon arose on the burnt-over remains of the old ones - houses of traditional design, so confident and assertive as to leave a casual visitor with a sense they’d always been there. Driving these sunny little lanes, the sense of permanence is tangible.
Nowhere is that permanence more evident than when one stands before the chateau which L has recently started calling home. Yes, technically, it was built on the cusp of the 21st century, but it’s a home that truly looks like it grew up where it stands, like a redwood tree, or perhaps it was carved out of the living earth like some luxe Canon de Chelle. As L traipsed up and down her twisting staircases, explored her lush pocket gardens and lost herself among the patterns in the reclaimed bricks and the shadow-mosaics on the wending poolside paths, as she opened herself to the essential oldness of this place, she found an apple tree with apples on it, and she was delighted.
I tasted one of those applies, hardly three bites of flesh, sun-warmed at the skin, forest-cool inside. It was bitter and sour, unripe fruit from an immature tree. That would soon enough change, I felt assured. In no time at all, that young girl would savor the honeyed sweetness of full fleshed fruit, and that winsome apple sapling would reach as high and deep as time itself. Both had already made a meaningful start.