Sunday is the only day of the week when I can really see what my life looks like. Every other day of the week I am on my way somewhere and getting worn out. Saturday I am in recovery and then on Sunday I am me, the me that I would be everyday if I wasn’t exhausted all the time.

On Saturday I water the plants and on Sunday they look watered, they stretch out, they darken their greens. We have a number of plants. When I first moved back to St. Louis I tried to reconnect with several high school friends that were living here. One of them, Mike, came over and was shocked at all of my plants. When I started talking about them and it became clear that they really were my plants, not some feminine touch that I tolerated in an otherwise manly home, he was appalled. He said something simple and asinine like, “There not really yours, right?”

We only had a few more visits after that, simply not much in common and my plants were an affront to his gender role confusion. I offered another man, Becky C’s stepbrother, a cup of tea once and the same thing happened. Poor guys, no tea or plants permitted in their John Wayne worlds. No one ever told them that John’s real name was Marian.

At the school I taught at last year there was a wrestling couch who also taught computer aided drafting. He had turned his classroom into an arboretum. He was on the back of the building and had good light. He didn’t know the names of most of the plants; he just knew that if people brought him sick plants, he could generally save them. He had red hair like mine, and a barrel chest. He rode his motorcycle into work most days. We seem of a similar sort, look like we could be brothers. I wonder about our genetic ancestry and our green thumbs. There is something of Bacchus in the redheads.