Bonsai!!

mini Owen (not on purpose..darn you Picassa!)

My high school library was pretty small.  It was L-shaped, the long section was wide and filled with shelves stacked two or three high.  The shorter section jutted back into the school and housed the seldom used reference collection. 

It was always pretty quiet there, unless a class was using it for research or a library tutorial.  Sometimes I would go in before school started, just to waste time browsing the shelves.  (Does that make me sound nerdy?  Or smart?  Hint, hint...choose smart.)

They had plenty of random books mixed in between the classic novels we all knew as required reading for Ms. Beneducci's English class.  Books on forgotten 60's singers, dusty woodworking manuals, guides to training your puppy.  Old history books and outdated math editions.  Someone had definitely donated their old hoard - all those books stored, thinking that they'd use them as references, but never did.  Now they filled out the gaps in our dewey decimal system and bulked up the library's own respectable collection.

One book in particular caught my attention: it was a how-to guide to growing bonsai trees.  Who knows why I remember checking out this book but I've always had a fascination with miniature things - doll houses and panoramas, I even spent some time considering how utterly transformed the shipping industry would be once we developed a shrink ray.

Bonsai trees seemed a natural blending of my love for nature and tiny, easily portable objects.  I could carry an entire, full grown tree around anywhere I went!  Think of the possibilities!!  

I devoured the book. I read about the best species to grow, the specific types of wire needed to coax the stunted limbs into intricate patterns, the recommended scissor types.  

The idyllic vision: me, snipping off a miniscule branch tip and smoothing out the tiny leaf of my Japanese red maple, then sitting back on my heels and absorbing the peace and tranquillity that my creation emitted. 

The reality: grown from seed, I'd be somewhere from 15 to 20 years older in my vision, probably busy doing grown up things, maybe even desperately trying to stop a toddler from eating the tree.  Sigh.

I tried to find a loop hole, a way to get a full grown bonsai NOW.  Maybe I could super feed it and keep it under a sun lamp to speed up the natural growth??

I put the book down. 

In a last desperate attempt it called out to me..."Wait!  Remember the time  you tried to make rose perfume by soaking old petals in water?  Remember all your pottery attempts with the clay from the back yard?  So what if those were failures, this time it will work!"

Idyllic visions die hard.   Mine typically deflate slowly, similarly to a pricked ballon - and definitely as sadly. (Remember the French short film about the Red Ballon? - kind of like that.)

I returned the book with a heavy heart.  Why does life take soooo long?

The lesson was eventually learned but it's taken me about as long as a bonsai to reach some level of maturity and I'm thankful for the pruning and careful restrictions that did, eventually,  shape my own life.  

And now, after all these years, my dream is kind of being fulfilled.  Not with a tree...but it takes about the same amount of time to grow a human, really.  And I finally have the patience to wait.  (And enough restraint not to try and see if I can keep my kids miniatures?  At least so far...)