Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Spidey and the Good Pot

The impending death of my desktop bamboo shoot reminds me of the plant I didn’t kill – my spider plant from college.  I’ve forgotten so many details of that incredible time and space, but ol’ Spidey isn’t one of them.  That was a damn fine houseplant. 

I kept him during junior year; he sat on my heavy moderne-blonde desk next to the rotating jughead captain’s throne, near the center of my bedroom’s powerful conversational nexus.  People spontaneously gathered in my room – sometimes, even, when I was sleeping, or sick.  Folk’s’d just show up and I’d pull on my bathrobe and pass around tabs of chewable C.  That room was a neverending party.  This sets the stage.  Let’s move on.

Among the other non-human inhabitants of that storied edifice, was Kashmir the cat.  She was barely out of kittenhood at that time; Jon and I had adopted her when we were sophomore suitemates.  We’d gotten her from two young women who were apparently too high-strung and self-involved to care for her.  Jon and I had our share of problems but these weren’t among them, so we gave her a home.  It appeared, though, that Kashmir’s personality had already been permanently altered by early exposure to intensely JAPPY conditions.  She was a beautiful dark grey semi-Persian, fluffy and smallboned and correctly persuaded that we’d do anything and everything to keep her happy.  Her imperious yowl ruled the roost, and all six of us living there then were just her catering/housekeeping crew.  She was, in truth, a feline American princess. 

That’s the set-up.  Here’s the payoff: a few of us were sitting around my bedroom one afternoon, enjoying the sunlight and each other’s company.  We sat in the traditional conversation circle, next to the windows and the throne and the desk, just letting time pass.  Kashmir entered the room, her long tail flicking the air with bored disdain.  We greeted her; she stepped over into our klatch for some fawning.  Since we were all on chairs and she was on the floor, we towered over her, so she crouched, pounced, and leapt in a single bound to the top of my desk, right into our very midst. 

I kept a tidy room during that phase of my life, and I maintained my desktop like a zen monk his rockyard.  I don’t now recall what-all I kept there, but there were things, all right, and they had an order to them.  Paperweights, novelty items, and a spider plant.  Yes, Spidey.  My faithful accomplice. 

When Kashmir leapt atop my desk, it just so happened that she launched herself unerringly from the floor right into the eight-inch wide circle of Spidey’s flowerpot, into which all four of her feet landed solid, square, and simultaneously.  She straddled the plant in an uneasy crouch, her feet resting on potting soil that was about half an inch short of the actual lip of the vessel.  She had no room to maneuver.  She was stuck.

Her leap had been graceful, truly a performance designed to make us mere humans envious of her perfection as an example of divine handiwork.  But now she found herself hunched nervously over a potted plant, staring at us with hunted eyes and kitty flopsweat.  And she could feel that things were getting steadily, progressively worse. 

Spidey’s pot was one of those old-fashioned ones with an outward slope of the side walls, so the mouth was somewhat wider than the base.  It’s a pretty sturdy design.  Sturdy, that is, unless something untoward happens.  As, for example, a cat jumping into it from three feet below.  It turns out, the sudden jumping of even a small, lithe, fuzzy, imperious catlet, smack into the middle of a pot such as this, will cause said pot to suffer a serious lack of stability. 

I’ll admit, I didn’t know that about this kind of pot when I got it.  Maybe it’s not good for a pot to start to tip, with excruciating slowness, backwards, while the cat trapped in it stares at you with an unspeakable curse, her momentum gradually but inexorably shifting her backwards, the forward edge of the base of the pot in which she’s balancing lifting higher and higher off the desktop, until the proverbial tipping point is reached and she tumbles clumsily to the hardwood floor with a stifled thump and catgrunt, and the plant crashes down on top of her.  Maybe this is not good for the pot, or for the plant, or cat.  It’s hard to tell so far as the cat is concerned, because she will flatten herself completely against the floor and retreat as rapidly and discreetly as possible, a grey streak flashing from the room, mortally shamed by our hoots of laughter, knowing that there was no way to pass this off as anything but a humiliating embarrassment. 

As for the plant, it lived happily in that pot for another year with me, suffering, apparently, no ill effects.  Had I known, at the time that I was buying that pot, that this had been one of its characteristics, I’d probably have considered it a selling point.  Damn, I’m still laughing at that one.  That’s a quality flowerpot.  And a damn fine houseplant, too.