Cycad

Whenever I'm feeling old, I like to stare at my Sago palm bonsai from Calyx & Corolla, not a palm but a cycad (Sycas revoluta) from a family alleged to date back 380 million years, with some controversial cousins even earlier.  When I think of cycads today, I think of New Zealand and series like Xena Warrior Princess, Beastmaster, or Hercules (with Kevin Sorbo), filmed there where cycads are commonly in the forest backgrounds.  Supposedly my plant is difficult and touchy, which seems strange for something with that ancestry.  Contrary to instructions, once a week, when I notice it is dry, I set it under a slow-dripping faucet and remove it only when the pineapple-like body and the planting compound are wet, when it goes back to its preferred sunny spot.  I do try to occasionally mist it along with my two troughs of Spathiphyllum or peace lily.  I'm always happy to see the much larger specimens, one quite huge, at Lauritzen Gardens Visitors Center.   Already mine has grown four much larger fronds above the three original fronds just developing when I received it.  Green consolation.

This is the Mama Bear size in the Lauritzen in the hallway through to the gardens out north.

And this is the Papa Bear size next to one of the handsome Mission style benches, which indicates, I hope, what mine might someday become with continued TLC.

I've various reasons for feeling too old, one being showing a Luckert family scrapbook to my youngest nephew, a college junior, who'd done a paper on his great grandfather this term.  It was only too clear that all the faces of my childhood were ghosts to him, difficult to relate to or keep straight.  That's not strange, inasmuch as most of them are dead.  After all, I don't remember the people he grew up with or lives with daily because I don't see them any more than he does our few remaining long-distance relatives.  Out of sight, out of mind works even for the living, as anyone who retires from the courthouse learns.  (You can't go home again, and you can't go back to work again.)  I've had the light shock before when I realized people in my home area under the age of, say, 40 or even 50 no longer remember Dad's hunting and fishing or Mom's singing, though I stoically know that memory chasm occurs every third generation.  It's just that it doesn't seem so long ago that we were taking Grandpa Luckert down to Aunt Lizzie's for Christmas or having family picnics with cousins now mostly in the Bloomfield cemetery, and the very young children in the photos are now grandparents.  It also means those who care about their families should be more attentive to their elderly and record their aging grandparents' and parents' memories while they can and keep their children aware of their roots.  I had yet other friends at a recent funeral of one of Center's widows do the "Yes, we should.  Yes, we meant to get around to that but never did."  With today's technology that is not even as difficult as putting old photos in scrapbooks.

We are not cycads, and, of course, I know how short a time I'll take to sink out of memory and be another photographic ghost, not having children.  But that's being part of the earth cycle, and, for right now, I'm more like this live tank below.  I was just thinking how lonely zoo animals must be--but they're alive, as I am.  As remarked frequently, for now it beats the alternative.