About that Rosemary Bush . . .

Years ago, in my other life in the inner city of Houston, I used to admire the rosemary bush in the yard of my friends Marguerite & Richard Pulley.

It was extraordinary – enormous & lush.

Not unlike a very large, very radiant, very fecund woman.  Only verdant.

When I exiled myself back to the suburbs of my youth, I built a garden & planted a bit of rosemary.

Which grew even larger than the rosemary bush in the Pulley’s back yard.

For years that bush was used to flavor chicken & marinara sauce & stuffed into our turkeys.

A ruthless, hard freeze annihilated all but a bit of the rosemary bush.

I planted the bit & a new, lusher, more prolific, more gorgeous rosemary bush emerged.

A bush I have been nurturing for twenty years.

 Several years ago, I cleared out the garden of intruding aloe vera plants (who knew they were so damned tenacious).  And I reduced the rosemary bush to a third of her size.

I hung dried rosemary everywhere (thinking it might ward off zombies if not vampires).  It was only later that I learned one can make pesto from rosemary . . .

The Mother of all rosemary bushes thrived & from her, I have raised three extraordinary young bushes.  I gave one to my friend Carolyne Massey.  Another I left in the garden.  And the last I placed in a planter in the front yard.

Yesterday, someone (who will remain nameless – I leave it to the reader to ascertain the identity of the culprit) decided that we needed more real estate in the garden & dug up Mother Rosemary.

When I confronted the culprit, he said:

But we have other rosemary bushes.

  

I held my temper, I held my tongue.  Taking a deep breath, I demanded that he go out into the yard, dig a whole, & replant Mother Rosemary.

In his defense, which is weak at best – who digs up another person’s plants – he just did not get what Mother Rosemary means to me.

If she does not survive in her new location, there will be another post.

Some things are sacred.  Mother Rosemary is one.

Baby Rosemary.

In Another Life with Kris Kristofferson

 

In another life, I taught Sunday School to fifteen-year-old girls.  I was 24 & totally not qualified to be leading a group of teenagers.

How I became a Sunday School teacher is another story for another day.

During that time, Kris Kristofferson starred in a remake of “A Star is Born” with Barbra Streisand.  The girls were madly in love & lust with him.  Or at least with his character in the film.  

And it happened that Kristofferson was touring the country & scheduled for a Houston  gig.  So I arranged a girls’ night out with my class & any others in the department to see the object of their lust in person.

(A sure sign that I was inept as a Sunday School teacher – what were their parents thinking?)

Other greats showed up for the final set – Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson . . .others I don’t remember.

Later, after the concert, I took the girls to IHOP & they looked at me in dismay.

Jaki, he is a country & western singer.

In my youth, I did not know how to explain Kris Kristofferson to a group of lusty fifteen year olds.

That he was not the character in “A Star is Born.”

That he was a Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of the US Army’s Ranger School, a man who quoted William Blake.

That he, not Janis Joplin, wrote “Me & Bobby McGee”. 

 And “For the Good Times” & “Help me Make it Through the Night” & my personal favorite, “Sunday Mornin´Comin’ Down”.

Or that he would eventually team up with Willie Nelson & Waylon Jennings & Johnny Cash to tour as “The Highwaymen”.

I sometimes wonder if those girls remember that night & how I tried to explain the enigma that is Kris Kristofferson to them.

Personally, I admire him much more as a songwriter than as an actor.

But for me, it is always about words.  Always.