the flora and fauna report

I’m sitting in a corporate cafeteria overlooking Manhattan. It is a mind-blowing view from three angles. The food isn’t great, but it’s cheap. With a view like this, I’ve been known to dally; today, though, I find myself trying to plow through my substandard turkey chili and salad bar acquisition as quickly as possible as I’ve unwittingly seated myself next to grand dames of suburbia. I really don’t want to listen to their conversation, but it’s hard not to when you’re eating by yourself. First they start talking about the price of gas. Then the tax on gas. Then the tax on cigarettes. Then smoking (and I really want a recap of what it does to your teeth and gums while I’m trying to eat, folks). Then quitting smoking. Then Weight Watchers. I finally wrap it up in time to keep myself from taking my flimsy plastic knife and beginning to saw away at my wrists. It’s a wonder some people don’t small talk each other to death.

I’ve become more aware in the last several months of how it is that we as people relate to one another on a social level as we get older. Now, I don’t like the telephone, but there’s no way to avoid it with my grandmothers. They just don’t get this whole technology thing at all. So I call my grandmothers and, bless their hearts, they don’t get out much, so I get the usual round of doctor reports and Sometimes I watch the television, and if I’m talking to Nana she calls me Doll and tells me God’s been good to her all these years and at least she’s got her health, and if I’m on with TaTa she tells me about this new dish they’ve got at Applebee’s and how she got pulled over by the cops again. But it’s pretty predictable – not much is going on, haven’t been doing much, my friends keep dying, the doctor wants to stick a balloon down my throat again, sure wish I could see you. It’s a flora and fauna report, and it breaks my damned heart. They want to know what’s new with me, and all I want to do is get off the phone. It’s a horrible way to be with people that I love, with people who know their hand is going to be up sooner than later and are living their lives like they’re counting the hours.

I am walking through Grand Central just for the heck of it and pass by my favorite flower stand in town – they have the most gorgeous roses. And I really am not a fan of roses - not really for me - but they remind me of my mother because she used to have a rose garden when I was little. It occurs to me that I haven’t spoken to my parents in forever. E-mail, sure, several times a week, but phone conversations are far and few between, so I figure I’ll make a quick and dirty phone call to la famiglia while walking crosstown. It is lovely to hear my mother’s voice. I tell her about the roses and how I wish I could buy them for her, and then we spend the next 10 minutes talking about doctor appointments. Both of us. Daddy’s at the dentist. She needs a root canal. I just dropped X amount of money at the eye doctor, had to change a prescription, was on the phone with my gynecologist’s office, blah blah blah, and I stop and say Why are we talking about doctor’s appointments? And she stops for a second, and says Well, I guess this is just where we are right now.

Then Daddy walks in from the dentist, so she puts him on, and my father and I talk about the dentist and insurance for a few minutes and then he asks if I have a 401(k) and I tell him no, but I have an IRA, actually a standard and a Roth, but I don’t know anything about money, I am a fiscal traffic wreck, so we talk about that for probably 10 minutes, how he doesn’t know anything about money either but we should both probably try to learn. He is 60 years old.

And as I’m getting ready to hang up, there is suddenly a break in this perfectly respectable, adult conversation we are having about bonds and the stock market and how we don’t have a clue how any of these damned things work, and he says I worry about you walking around at 4 o’clock in the morning. And I stop, because I know why he’s bringing this up. There was a murder in town last week – it has all the marks of being serial – a gal about my weight, my height, my coloring, supposedly vanished off the street around 4 a.m. down on the LES and they found her body in Brooklyn, raped, sodomized, genital mutilation, suffocated, her head wrapped in clear packing tape like a mummy. There was a murder a couple of years ago, in my neighborhood, but the details of that demise seem almost childlike compared to this one. I did not realize that this had gone national, but I can tell from the edge in my father’s voice that this recent murder has obviously bothered him, and he says She was little like you.

I’m used to getting worst-case-scenario e-mails from my mother, where she tells me that the terrorism warning levels have risen in the country again and the world is going to end, but this note in my father’s voice makes me fight lumps in my throat and wish to God I was the type of person who could just chuck everything I own, get on a plane and hug him. I have been in this town for 9 years, and all any of us have gotten is older. It’s all flora and fauna. I remind myself I had something I wanted to accomplish when I moved here, but damned if I remember what it was anymore. Maybe I accomplished it and I just slept through it. Maybe my priorities have just changed, but somehow at this moment none of it seems more important than the people I have back home who just want to tell me about their crowns falling out, who just want to hold my hand.