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  “And the Taurus?” I asked. “That’s not a particularly glamorous name.” I popped open the sunroof.

  “What’s that?”

  “This car, a Ford Taurus.”

  He looked at me. “Your car is a Taurus? Like the zodiac sign?”

  “Yes. So is yours, but I have the sedan.”

  “The sign of the bull.”

  “I thought you knew that.”

  “I did not.”

  “My first car was a Fiesta. Fiesta, Taurus, next a hybrid, I hope. Those are the cars I have owned.”

  “‘Ask me for my biography and I will tell you the books I have read.’”

  I knew from his tone he was probably quoting someone. I turned on the radio. He has said before that I pay too much attention to my cars, by which he means I should marry and have a family. But is the American Dream more house or car? Is it putting down roots or being able to move? Most people can’t decide.

  “How’s the English professor?” Leo asked when we walked into El Puerto. He called out to the kitchen my father’s usual—a pinto bean burrito with extra guacamole—and escorted us to a table.

  “Fine . . . sir,” my father said after a quick glance at me. Then he bowed, and Leo, smiling, bowed back.

  “Do you know he’s impervious to poison ivy?” my father said as Leo walked away.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He told me. We do occasionally speak when you are not around.”

  I opened my menu and my father pulled an envelope out of his breast pocket. Inside was a thank-you note from—judging from the penmanship—one of the kindergarteners on the street.

  “Bella,” he said, showing it to me. “And her little brother, Henry. I gave them some coneflowers from the garden.”

  By garden, my father meant the bed behind the house that I’d started years ago and now ignored. Certain of the hardier perennials, echinacea among them, continued to thrive amid the weeds.

  “Very nice,” I said, handing the note back.

  “They’re our neighbors.”

  I knew that. I also knew that Bella and Henry’s mother, Janine, often stood in her front yard eyeing the Norway maple (Acer platanoides) in her yard, my favorite tree on the block. It’s holding on to a lot of dead wood—Norway maples die slowly from the top down—and for that reason stands out like a battle-hardened warrior on our leafy street. I wish it were in front of our house because I would never cut it down. Janine’s thoughts on trees I can’t read.

  “Are they?” I said.

  My father frowned and we ate salsa and tortilla chips for a few minutes without talking. For an old man, my father eats neatly, which is a blessing.

  Many of our neighbors on Todd Lane, like Janine, arrived within the past five or six years. But some have lived on the street much longer than that, by which I mean they probably have memories of me as a child. And yet we rarely greet one another with more than a wave. And that’s fine because, frankly, when do you work into a conversation the difficult details of your life? Am I supposed to give them all the information for their benefit, to explain my eccentricities? Maybe I should put up a sign? Yes. Let’s all have signs up and down the street announcing our personal disasters and disappointments. That would be helpful, perhaps even neighborly.

  “We live in close proximity, that is true,” I said.

  Ash (Fraxinus excelsior)

  In my mailbox the next evening I found a photocopied picture of an ash tree (Fraxinus excelsior) with a question mark in the upper-right-hand corner. The ash is native to the British Isles and is particularly vigorous on limestone rocks, since it tolerates calcium in the soil. Ash seeds are called keys because they resemble keys used for medieval locks, and the tree’s branching crown is always open, with ample space between the limbs and twigs. The wood is preferred above all others for the handles of hammers, axes, shovels, chisels—any tool subject to sudden shocks and strains.

  In many ways, the ash presents an ideal model for a family tree.

  I separated the photocopy from the rest of the mail and added it to the stack on top of the microwave. This was the archive of my father’s memorial tree research. He hopes the university will plant a tree in his honor before he dies, but if that doesn’t happen, the plan is for me to designate one privately. The pressing question: What kind?

  My father has been giving me these photocopies, his tree sheets, for three years.

  The Yew

  When Leo opened his promenade in June, the news made the paper’s restaurant section. In July, a poet in the English Department won the world’s richest prize for a single poem—fifty thousand dollars. That made the front page. The poem was about a yew (Taxus baccata) in one of the university gardens and the paper reprinted the poem alongside a photograph of the tree. Our grounds crew—which at that moment consisted of me, Sue, Blake O’Dell, and five college students working summer jobs—sat at a picnic table on campus and read it over lunch. Blake couldn’t see it very well from the far side of the table, so when Sue and I were done, we pushed it over to him. She and I chewed quietly while he read. Then, when he was done, he pushed the paper down to the students at the end of the table, and he chewed quietly until they were done.

  The poem was titled “The Darkling Yew” and it had 4 stanzas, 32 lines, and 166 words. I know that because Sue got the paper back from the students and counted them all out loud. When she was done, Blake looked up at the clouds for a moment and said, “That’s in the neighborhood of three hundred dollars a word.”

  One of the students at the end of the table whistled.

  “I remember when you put that cutting in,” Blake said.

  “I was just thinking about that,” I said.

  “I recall thinking it wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Foliage that contains highly toxic alkaloids at a peanut-free university.” He smiled. “Seemed like asking for trouble.”

  “It was. But we put the sign up.”

  He nodded. “And it’s too close to the wall.”

  “The wall is compromised in that section,” Sue said. “The roots are up under it. Architecture complains every year. I guess they won’t anymore.”

  The picture of the yew that accompanied the story was very poor. It is a dark and mysterious tree native to Europe and Great Britain, but the newspaper’s grainy black-and-white photograph, which appeared to be about two years out of date, made it look like an ill-formed Christmas tree. The yew’s ancient association with churchyards dates from the first Christian missionaries, who preached below the year-round shelter of its spreading canopy, a symbol of everlasting life. Its timber has greater elasticity and strength than any other tree. I hoped people would come and see the yew for themselves. Then I imagined a crowd in the small garden, people touching the needles, children climbing the trunk, and I shuddered.

  I had acquired the cutting from the Fortingall Yew, which stands at the geographical heart of Scotland, in a small village not far from Loch Tay. I’ve never been, but I’ve looked at many pictures because the yew in the churchyard there is believed to be at least three thousand years old. When English tree surgeons announced they were taking cuttings from the tree to be grown by the Forestry Commission and replanted around the UK, I made the case to the head of Landscape Architecture, who in turn appealed to the Office of the Architect, that if we acquired one we would be continuing the tradition of our revered founders, who planted more than one hundred species of trees on the original campus. The founder argument almost always prevails, and later that year my cutting was planted as part of the Founders Day ceremonies. It was planted in one of the smaller university gardens near the library and dedicated to an employee in Historic Preservation who was retiring, someone I didn’t know, but who was deemed, as tradition stipulates, “a person who has made a lasting contribution to the design, planning,
and maintenance of the grounds.” Fortunately there are no plaques affiliated with these Founders Day trees, just a list kept on the university website, so I know who the yew belongs to.

  I met the cutting at the airport and took it immediately to the university greenhouse where I potted it and tended it until planting. By late spring it was well rooted and I hardened it off for three weeks in a cold frame—the first week under a layer of horticultural fleece I special ordered. I prepped the soil in the garden with plenty of chalk before the planting ceremony, and for several winters after that cleared the young branches after every snow. In year seven, I reirrigated the entire garden to improve drainage.

  The yew is one of very few conifers that do not bear their seeds in a cone. Instead, each seed is enclosed in a tiny red cup known as an aril, the flesh of which is very sweet and not toxic. It’s a favorite of blackbirds. All other parts of the tree, however, are poisonous, so we had to cordon it off behind a low landscape chain and install a sign:

  YEW

  TAXUS BACCATA

  FROM A CUTTING OF THE

  FORTINGALL YEW, PERTHSHIRE, SCOTLAND

  3,000–5,000 YEARS OLD

  PLEASE BE ADVISED: FOLIAGE, BERRY, AND BARK TOXIC TO HUMANS

  It took a long time to settle on the wording. The administration wanted warning. I thought something like please note would suffice. We compromised on be advised and Blake added the please at the last minute. Nevertheless, there are complaints every couple of years and I have worried that the tree would be sacrificed to appease the worried mother of a freshman. The poet’s prize seemed to secure the yew’s future, and for that I was grateful.

  The yew stands alone, which is a shame. Many scientists believe trees can befriend each other, intertwining their roots to share resources and bending their branches to make sure each gets enough sun. Some think that a pair can become so close that when one of the trees dies, the other one dies, too. About fifty feet to the west stands a very fine Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis). The weather generally comes from that direction, and as the Sitka tolerates wind blast exceptionally well, I know it creates a shelter belt for the yew. That’s something.

  And the yew is thriving. In fact, there is something about the yew only Blake and I know, and I caught his eye across the table at lunch. It was our job to care for the trees in that section of the university gardens, including regularly calculating height and girth. The yew is a long-lived species, and slow growing; it usually takes about ten years to reach a height of six feet. My yew was fifteen years old and had already reached twenty. Blake and I didn’t know why, but the yew appeared to be growing inexplicably fast.

  Road Trip

  For years my family drove every August to visit my paternal grandmother in New England. We always drove straight through, often packing our own food in a cooler and stopping at a rest area to eat. My father, brother, and I would take our sandwiches to a picnic table. My mother usually stayed in the car. Sometimes I knew why, other times I might have fallen asleep and lost track of what was upsetting her. Everything was dry that late in the season, but the air would be thick with humidity. I would check for spiders, then stretch out on the bench and watch the clouds. In my memory all the colors are exactly the way they are supposed to be: green leaves, blue sky, white clouds; just as a child might draw them. There are no shadings, no unusual effects of lighting or weather.

  My father might buy a newspaper, extending our lunch break, which meant he was tired. My mother might smoke a cigarette in the car with the door open, one long leg stretched out onto the pavement, while my brother, clutching some sweet from the vending machine, ran back and forth between them.

  After lunch we resumed our positions in the car. My father always drove and I sat behind him. My mother remained in the passenger seat, as always, and my brother sat behind her. The diagonals are what is important here. From my position, I could see the edge of my mother’s face, not her full profile unless she turned to tune the radio or look at my father, but enough to gauge her mood. My brother had the same view of my father.

  And that is how we grew up, with me watching my mother, my brother watching my father. Of course, the young family in that car is gone, as extinct as any mammal could be. The little blond boy running back and forth with a cookie? His hair turned dark by his teens but he kept running, all the way to California. The father who, later that same summer, brought back a wild cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) and tried for years to keep it alive in an inhospitable spot in his too-dry garden? He gave up his wildflower walks. The too-observant ten-year-old? I gave up, too, started paying more attention to books and plants.

  Those summer visits were quiet, full of reading and long walks in the woods and almost no socializing. But one night I remember my father shaving and putting on a jacket. My grandmother made deviled eggs and my brother and I were told to dress nicely. I registered these events the way one would a cold snap; strange, but refreshing.

  The cocktail party was in a house just down the street and the guest of honor wore a wig and thick beige nylons. She sat in a chair by the window and although she smiled and talked and even had a gin and tonic, she never stood up. Her son, a dark-haired boy of ten or eleven, didn’t stray far and brought her a shawl when she complained of a chill. My father had a drink or two more than usual that evening, and I learned from him later that the woman in the wig was dying of cancer. She was dead by September.

  The cocktail party had been the dying woman’s idea, her last chance to say good-bye to her friends and neighbors. My grandmother was a friend, and she must have insisted we go with her. This was fascinating to me because my family tended to use any excuse not to have friends over. Dying would certainly have been at the top of the list.

  One memory from those summer drives is particularly vivid. We’d stopped for lunch, as usual, and I was sitting on a bench near a bed of English ivy (Hedera helix). A spider had built his web just above the ivy and I decided to toss a little seed pod at him to see how he would take it. The weight of the pod was too much and it tore through his web. He scrambled over to see what had happened. Without any hesitation he clipped the wayward strand, releasing the pod, then set about repairing his home. In no time at all he was back again in the center, waiting, though now at a new angle to the ground.

  Driving Lessons

  The next time I saw Leo I asked if he was sure he’d been exposed to poison ivy. “My mother thought I was immune to chicken pox until I got it when she was teaching me to drive. I had a terrible case. I missed a week of school.”

  He described a typical poison ivy rash convincingly, so I nodded.

  “Your mother taught you to drive?” he asked, still standing by my table.

  “Yes.”

  “No,” he said, smiling.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “It’s a father’s job,” he said with mock authority.

  “In all other ways my parents had very traditional roles. But my mother was a good driver.”

  “And your father is not?”

  “He’s fine, but it meant something more to my mother.” She wanted to teach me, for some reason.

  The minute I said it I knew it was true, but it was not something I’d realized before.

  The year I was fifteen, instead of taking the driver’s-education class at my high school, I drove with my mother in the evenings. When I could circle the block without stalling—she insisted I learn on a manual transmission—she let me go farther. We listened to the radio, and she would bring two cans of soda, though I wasn’t allowed to open mine until the lesson was finished. I drove while she sipped, marking the beat of songs she liked with a little bounce of her chin.

  Toward the end of the semester, my mother and I drove through the hilly parts of campus so I could practice hill starts and I remember her pointing at the Christmas-decorated balconies of the student dorms. “Little rectangles of ch
eer,” she called them. I believe she was happy then. It was the year she turned forty. The next year she helped me buy a used Ford Fiesta, though she had never owned her own car. When that car died, I bought a first-generation Taurus, which still had a manual transmission option. That’s Bonnie.

  I like to drive but over the years an archive of accidents I’ve read about, like a mental flip book of tragedy, has stuck in my head. The woman walking to church, hit so hard by a car her head was severed from her body and flew a hundred feet. The teenager on a forest road, impaled by a tree branch, invisible in the dappled summer sunlight, that came through the windshield. There are others. I’ve read that the local school crossing guard is not allowed to touch anyone crossing the street, not even the little old ladies who stand on the curb and flutter their elbows like wings for assistance, because if something were to happen, the liability for the city is too great. We hurl ourselves around in cars, but we’re not allowed to touch each other crossing the street? It’s an absurd arrangement, and by that I mean there are ironies everywhere the world does not allow you to talk about even half as much as you’d like.

  I’d stopped eating my burrito. Leo came back and asked if I wanted something else, but I told him I was fine.

  The promenade was crowded—Leo had to fit in seven tables to make the venture economically viable—but no one seemed to mind. The McDonald’s across the street had hoisted so many American flags from its roof after 9/11 that a good wind made the whole area sound like a marina. Beyond the McDonald’s, after perhaps another eighth of a mile of cars, was a larger strip mall called Barracks whose main stores were a Whole Foods, a Bed Bath & Beyond, a Barnes & Noble, a trendy optometrist’s, and a Ruby Tuesday. It was by far the more popular mall, doing many times the business of Wayside, which had only El Puerto, a quilting store, and a family-owned pharmacy in that order along the long arm of an L. A salon called Shear Elegance, in which three pairs of flip-flops mounted over a crucifix were the main decor, occupied the corner. Then there was an empty storefront and finally Mrs. Kim’s Inconvenience. The Barracks lot was landscaped with mature crepe myrtles that bloomed raspberry red in late summer, purple salvia, boxwood, arborvitae, and seasonal flags. When Barracks filled up, people often parked at Wayside and walked across the road, which was a problem for El Puerto because then people were more likely to eat at the Ruby Tuesday or grab a sandwich at the Barnes & Noble café.