Don't Cut Down the Tree

February 2017

Lately I think my visions and plans aren’t adding up well. Boring, grueling, dull. Find a partner, get my coaching practice going again, work, work, work.

Yogi Berra says, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” But which fork, Yogi? We can only choose from the forks we see—unless something else happens. Something else may be what saves me.

Human beings imitate. I grew up with a mom of genius IQ who cooked and cleaned and ironed all day. And Dad, who saved people’s lives with his own hands, stitching their guts back together with thread. Teaching residents how to think about science and life and death. Teaching governments how to think about war. Teaching the Saudis to set up a medical school.

Teaching me to build a telegraph from the lid of a peanut butter jar, to change my own oil. To believe I could do anything.

If you can do anything do you spend your time ironing? Or go out and teach residents and governments? Those were the choices I saw.

The ironing speaks for itself so I chose the Dad fork, modified. Coach the people who run things, create things, manage things. The thing is, those people want credentials, letters after your name. I didn’t go to medical school, so I invent letters for myself, and a company name, and when I go to a function my name tag says Anne Herman, Creative Human Being.

I suspect I look like a colorful, creative disaster to the folks who live from Excel spread sheets. A weight comes on me just thinking about it. I’m Sisyphus, rolling big gray rocks up a big steep hill and I’m tired. There are moments in the sun at the top but the bottom is always there waiting.

I think that you have to envision and plan and my visions are versions of being my dad and avoiding the ironing. That’s all I’ve been seeing: two roads.

Meanwhile a bad choice of my dad’s leaves me with no money and facing necessity. I have tea with a woman who teaches and I say, “Oh, I’d love to do that,” and she says, “You can. The school districts need people.”

Soon I’m teaching math to four kids who fidget and giggle and tell me they failed preschool. They are in eighth grade now.

“You can do this,” I say. “Pay attention.”

At the end of an hour they’ve finished their worksheets and there is this light in their eyes.

There’s one fork. The light in the eyes of an eighth grader finishing her math—or a medical school in Riyadh? I choose the eighth grader, Alexandra, who smiles at me in the hall the next day.

What does Dad’s ghost think about this? “I just want you to be happy, Anne.” What he always said.

As for the men, I had a vision there, too. A couple years older, so I’ll still be young and beautiful to him. Kids, for that energy and brightness. Enough money that the future seems handled.

But control is always an illusion, really.

Trudging down the long gray road with that vision, checking OKC now and then but virtual men don’t actually interest me. Tiny flat pictures made up of pixels and careful or careless words on a screen.

Then one Sunday night I stop by the QFC and there’s a man standing by the flowers. He is tall and strong with long shining hair and he radiates goodness and joy, and I think he can’t be more than twenty-five. A disaster, my planning mind thinks. Lucky that’s not the only mind I have.

I’m in bulk foods and he’s grinding peanut butter and I say, “It’s really good when it’s warm,” and he says, “You first.” I dip my finger in his warm peanut butter and lick it off.

He mentions acorn butter.

“Acorn butter?”
“Yeah, we should go find some acorns.”

We.

Instead we go to the river and walk in the dark without flashlights, and there is that newly created We.

We make peanut butter sandwiches in the car and he asks, “In your fantasy, what happens next?” The man is a master of creation.

He asks if he carries me over the threshold, and when we get there he really does.

I try to talk him out of it.

“I’m probably older than your parents,” I say.

“I don’t care how many moments you’ve had on the Earth,” he says.

In the morning I’m sure this will be the end of it, although he still says We.

But last night, two weeks later, he’s on my doorstep again and he says, “I brought some more stuff to strew around your house.”

It’s true. In my fridge sits his cheese from two weeks ago. Three bars of chocolate on various tables. His fleece from last night upstairs on the railing. A pickle on the counter, his toothbrush in the bathroom.

This morning he says he’ll leave his food, more food, in the fridge so we can make fajitas. He says we’ll make a plan.

Upstairs his shirt, a different shirt, is draped over the railing.

*     *     *

And I choose this.

That first night I said, “This is a great moment but I’m tired of just moments.”

And he said, “Oh, I don’t want just a moment. I want a long string of moments.”

Where the string ends nobody knows. If I focus on that I’ll kill it. Cut down a tree to count the rings and you kill the tree. You’ll know exactly how old the tree was when it died.

So I choose the eighth grader and the beautiful man who calls me Cherished Anne in his texts.  

I won’t cut down the tree.