Rooting For Bob

A good friend – and his houseplants – reminded me that impermanence can last forever.

The epiphany hit me like a thunderclap the moment I glanced at the green baby.

I was packing boxes, preparing to move to a new apartment, when my gaze focused on a tiny spider plant thriving in a sunny corner of my bedroom, a sprout that just days earlier had been carefully separated from its much larger “mother plant” and placed into water to develop roots. I’d transplanted it into fresh soil a week later.

Given a recent gut-punch of a loss, this solitary creature, one literally rooted in past generations of spider plants, brought to mind the nature of human impermanence: how we all reach a point in time when our bodies can no longer support our souls. As I took in the tiny plant, it occurred to me that death, like life itself, is a universal mandate from the Cosmos that we all must eventually face.

Several spider plant cuttings placed in water had been gifted to me by the family of a good friend who’d passed about two weeks earlier. My understanding is that Bob, who’d died peacefully in his sleep at age 90, had never really cared for houseplants, but that he’d taken on this task to honor his late wife, Doris, who’d passed about 10 years earlier.

It turned out that Bob had a knack for nurturing houseplants. Then again, he’d always had a knack for nurturing pretty much everything. About a week after my friend left this Earthly Plane, some 30 folks gathered in his Prescott, Arizona, home to pay our respects and reminisce about a life well lived. There, family members offered a vibrant variety of art work to take, as well as green cuttings from Bob’s and Doris’ plants.

That was typical Bob: extending his life and love even after embracing his own impermanence …

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I’d arrived in Prescott six years earlier, having packed up my Toyota Matrix and left Southern California only four weeks after first scouting out the Northern Arizona town. Although Prescott’s down-home Western charm and century-old downtown called to me at a visceral level, when I arrived I didn’t know a soul. Only years later did I realize how very lonely I’d been.

One of the possessions I’d managed to fit into my Toyota for the move was “Brutus,” a hearty pothos houseplant gifted to me some 35 years earlier. Over the decades, Brutus and I had together endured multiple moves, as well as so many of life’s spectacular highs and lows.

The morning after spending a stressful night in a local fleabag dump (“hotel” would be stretching the definition), and still without a clue as to where I’d live, my old friend Brutus committed suicide.

Actually, he slipped off my recently waxed hood as I was shifting contents in the car, and crashed onto the asphalt, shattering his pot. Biting back a scream of pent-up anger, I muttered several f-bombs and, in a rageful panic, tossed the houseplant into a nearby trash can. The previous day or so had been stressful beyond words, and I’d never handled stress well; when I hit critical mass and something within me snapped, I blew up. Brutus was the unintended victim. (To this day it absolutely kills me that I didn’t rush my decades-long compatriot to the nearest nursery for botanical resuscitation. It remains one of my most profound regrets.)

About a week later, I was sitting in a local coffee shop, working on an article for a SoCal newspaper and still battling “new-in-town-freefall mode” – I was far from thrilled with the place I’d moved into and I’d yet to make any friends – when a diminutive elderly gentleman sitting to my right tapped me on the shoulder.

“Where did you get that thing?” he inquired.

The friendly fellow was referring to a unique collapsable laptop holder that raised my MacBook to eye level. (I’d seen people hunched over their own laptops, and, at six-four, I knew that doing so myself would eventually lead to a deep and lasting relationship with the local chiropractor.) After showing Bob the device, we began talking.

What seemed like 20 or so minutes later in conversation, I looked at my watch. Two hours had passed. This was something that I’d grow to expect when spending time with Bob. While my new friend was a lot of things, he was, first and foremost, the most extraordinarily curious person I’d ever known. The result: Our conversations always had a way of bending time.

“Hey,” I eventually said, glancing from an overworked barista to Bob, “we gotta stay in touch.”

“Absolutely!” So we swapped phone numbers.

Doing so forever changed the course of my life.

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About three months after settling in Prescott, I stumbled across an image on the internet, one depicting a kitten embracing a tiny duckling. It’s not by accident that the first person I shared this with was my new friend, Bob.

He loved it … so much so that, for the rest of his life, he used that image in his email signature, adding three words that encapsulated this wonderful human being so aptly: “Love and Light.”

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Although Bob was a kind, gentle soul, he had a slightly subversive bent, and was often willing to question authority figures and institutions.

Case in point: A few months ago, I was scheduled to undergo a medical procedure, which I shall not disclose, at the local hospital. (Hint: the procedure, which involved a rather hefty dose of propofol, rhymes with “colonoscopy.” ‘Nuff said.) The hospital’s marching orders prohibited post-op patients, still returning from Planet Plastered, from driving themselves home. Bob had agreed to give me a ride.

Maybe it was the old, detail-oriented copy editor in me, but one day a light bulb went off in my noggin.

“I got an idea,” I told my medical chauffeur. “My paperwork says, quote, ‘The patient must be picked up from the hospital by another driver. Rideshare services are prohibited.’ Notice anything funny about the wording, Bob?”

“No, not really.”

“The operative words here are, ‘must be picked up.’ It doesn’t say anything about where you’ll take me, now does it?”

With a playful gleam in his eyes, my nonagenarian friend smiled.

The following day, Bob did indeed pick me up at the hospital. From there, we drove an estimated 75 yards to my parked car, where he let me out.

Mission accomplished.

“You okay?” Bob asked as I semi-wobbled toward my car.

“I’m good,” I said, grinning. “And thanks.”

With an expression that can only say, Hell yeah, we beat the system, my friend gave me a brisk salute and threw his Subaru into gear.

Still a bit more groggy than I care to admit, I drove myself back to my apartment, all the while watching for burning, overturned vehicles and flattened pedestrians in my rear-view mirror.

A humorless, by-the-book rules follower might’ve seen himself as a possible accessory to vehicular manslaughter. But to my generous, gracious friend, our little stunt was wicked fun.

Just three weeks later, Bob died peacefully in his sleep. With that, the world was down one extraordinary human being.

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Today, thanks to Bob and several other wonderful friends, as well as a conscious choice to avoid a jail cell known as “my comfort zone,” I’m finally in a position to redeem myself, to atone for the demise of Brutus, my old houseplant. I intend to do so by nurturing that baby spider plant, and many more like it, all gifted to me by Bob through his loving family.

Nurturing anything – and, perhaps most glaringly and tragically, nurturing myself – has never come easy. (Why? That’s another essay.) However, thanks to Bob and the many wonderful friends I’ve met through him, I’m finally learning, kicking and screaming, I might add, how to do just that.

Bob, you embodied “Love and Light” in every word, in every action. Speaking for everyone blessed to know you, I’ll forever miss your engaging, always-curious and occasionally subversive ways.

And every time I’ll nurture your and Doris’ tiny spider plant – and the many, many more green souls that I promise will thrive in my new apartment – I’ll think of you and revel in your “Love and Light.”

Your plants, like your legacy, will always remind us of how, paradoxically, impermanence lasts forever.

Kudos to the fine folks in my Write Hearted community for their valuable input while this essay was being drafted: Rachel Parker, Neha Patel and Rick Lewis.

And thank again, Bob, for everything.