Dear Boo and Bubble,
It’s uncanny sometimes how something can bring back a memory. I’m talking about a memory buried so deeply for years in the recesses of the mind that only a powerful trigger can conjure it up. In late March or early April of 2004, I had such an incident.
We were in Georgetown on Grand Exuma Island in the Bahamas. Actually, we had been there for several weeks at the back end of a months-long cruise on our sailboat “Up Jinks.” It had been enough time in one place to establish some of the routines that constancy initiates. One of these routines was to go to Forbes Enterprises in the middle of town to get on the internet. At least twice a week, we would bundle up our computer, carefully load it into the dinghy and ride over to the community dock on Lake Victoria. From there, it was a short walk to Forbes.
Inevitably, we’d have to wait for a hook-up. Wintertime in Georgetown is always quite crowded with cruisers. Just like us, they rely on the internet to communicate with family and friends back home. Forbes was one of the few places you could go to get online.
This particular day, I was waiting my turn, sitting in a folding chair, chatting with some of the other people in the building. For some reason, my eyes drifted over to a stack of books that rested on the sill of a window looking out onto Lake Victoria. They were school texts for the most part, maybe those of one of the Forbes children who frequently came in and out during the day. The one on top, however, was not a textbook. It was definitely a storybook and, even though I hadn’t seen it or thought about it for more than forty years, I recognized it instantly. There, in the window at Forbes, on the cover of this book, stood the Little Prince on Asteroid B-612.
I felt like Harry Potter transporting through a portal and reconstituting in the hallway at 3 Lakecrest. That’s where the bookcase was, where resting on the third shelf from the bottom was our well worn copy of “The Little Prince.”
“The Little Prince,” Antoine De Saint-Exupery’s whimsical fable about understanding what’s truly important in life, was great Granddaddy Schaefer's favorite book. Probably before I could understand a single word he said, he was reading it to me. As a child, I was captivated by its peculiar illustrations – the boa constrictor swallowing the elephant, the baobabs, the prince raking out his volcanoes. It would be years before I could see beyond the pictures and the words to understand the message.
Granddaddy has been gone almost twenty years now. In all that time, I don’t think I’ve properly sorted through the stages of grief in losing him. There are still boxes in storage filled with his writings, personal artifacts and memorabilia. I haven’t had the heart to go through them. But, I after that trip to the Bahamas, I did something that virtually brought him back to life for me – I reread “The Little Prince.”
I was struck with the parallels between the points of the story and what granddaddy believed important. He always instilled in us that we should never judge others, especially on their physical appearance.
I have serious reasons to believe that the planet the little prince came from is Asteroid B-612. This asteroid has been sighted only once by telescope, in 1909 by a Turkish astronomer, who had then made a formal demonstration of his discovery at an International Astronomical Congress. But no one had believed him on account of the way he was dressed. Grown-ups are like that.
Fortunately for the reputation of Asteroid B-612, a Turkish dictator ordered his people, on pain of death, to wear European clothes. The astronomer repeated his demonstration in 1920, wearing a very elegant suit. And this time everyone believed him.
We moved into the house at 3 Lakecrest when I was in the first grade. Granddaddy took a special interest in landscaping the yard. This was especially true of the azaleas. He spent hours gathering cuttings, dipping them in Root-Tone and planting them in tin cans. They stayed nestled beside the front porch steps, protected from the elements, until they were grown enough to transplant in the yard. He would carefully dig out roots and then diligently turn the soil to make receptive beds for his new charges. It was his contribution to environmentalism.
And, in fact, on the little prince’s planet there were – as on all planets – good plants and bad plants. The good plants come from good seeds, and the bad plants from bad seeds. But the seeds are invisible. They sleep in the secrecy of the ground until one of them decides to wake up. Then it stretches and begins to sprout, quite timidly at first, a charming, harmless little twig reaching toward the sun. If it’s a radish seed, or a rosebush seed, you can let it sprout all it likes. But if it’s the seed of a bad plant, you must pull the plant up right away, as soon as you can recognize it. As it happens, there were terrible seeds on the little prince’s planet….baobab seeds. The planet’s soil was infested with them. Now if you attend to a baobab too late, you can never get rid of it again. It overgrows the whole planet. Its roots pierce right through. And if the planet is too small, and if there are too many baobabs, they make it burst into pieces.
“It’s a question of discipline,” the little prince told me later on. ‘When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet. You must be sure you pull up the baobabs regularly, as soon as you can tell them apart from the rosebushes, which they closely resemble when they’re very young. It’s very tedious work, but very easy.”
(To be continued.....)
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