Fake Plastic Trees

Sorry to disappoint you, I'm not talking about the awesome song by Radiohead. However, it was my inspiration for thinking ABOUT fake plastic trees. In all my life I never realized that I had so many stories involving fake plastic trees. Just goes to show that one can write about any subject really. I can think of five times in my past that fake plastic trees made an impression on me. How many can you think of?

1) When I was about eight years old my parents took me and my brother on a road trip through various states and up to Philadelphia to visit my sister and brother-in-law. You can imagine how excited we were to travel through Virginia touring various civil war cemeteries in the dead of winter in a big yellow Suburban. Along the way my older brother and I invented many ways of amusing ourselves; games such as Slapout and Combs involved more than a little violence and didn't amuse my mother at all. I remember we ate at a lot of Howard Johnsons and Denny's restaurants. We couldn't help but notice the little sprigs of parsley that seemed to garnish every meal. One time my brother, Mike, decided to eat his parsley and it turned his whole mouth green. We had a good laugh at that one, but it's really not the subject of this blog. The next restaurant we went to my Dad judiciously offered Mike his sprig of parsley to eat. Mike almost refused but decided it might be funny. However, it turned out that this parsley was in fact fake green plastic. Again we had a good laugh, but later I wondered what the restaurant managers were thinking. I mean, most people know not to eat it, but what if some idiot choked?

2) When I was a kid, my dentist's office had the usual drab decorations you can find anywhere. But I remember clearly two items of interest. One was a painting of Chinatown in the rain. Looking at it was like looking through a rain-streaked windshield. It was lovely to me because it still made sense even when I had to remove my glasses and wait for the doctor for thirty minutes. Anyway, the office had a few potted trees in the corners of the waiting room. My mother being the gardening connoisseur of the family just couldn't stand seeing plants with dead leaves still attached. She waited as long as she could but when she couldn't stand it anymore, she leaned over and plucked about three or four from the plant. The secretary looked up just as she did it and started laughing at her. Embarrassed, my Mom stuffed the brown leaves in her purse and gave me a sheepish look. I raised an eyebrow at her and she said, "Fake plant." We snorted a little but managed to hold our composure together. The secretary sweetly explained that the brown leaves were supposed to make the plant appear real. When we got to the car I made her promise not to help anyone with their interior decorating anymore.

3) When I was a teenager I worked (for a very short period of time) for a local lawyer/family friend running his office and doing errands for him while his family was on a well-deserved vacation. Anyone who knows a lawyer at all knows that "short list" isn't in their vocabulary. He'd left me a short list of about 500 things to do for him while he was gone. I remember as I let myself into his house to feed/water the cats, I noticed a huge wall of houseplants. The houseplants weren't on the list but I figured it was an oversight and I diligently watered each and every one of them daily for about two weeks. It wasn't until much later that his wife told me they were, you guessed it, all fake. The water had collected at the bottom of them and molded horribly. I was embarrassed to death; I'd managed to successfully file a bankruptcy case at the downtown courthouse without a hitch but ruined hundreds of dollars worth of fake plants. You'd think a lawyer could afford real ones, but then you'd think an eighteen year-old could tell the difference.

4) My sister has the ugliest fake tree in her house that one can imagine. It's called a Topiary or something. Its like a stick with a square of green and more stick with a big round ball of green on top. I don't know what it's actually made of, but we tease her a lot about her "Chia tree". As a joke I grabbed it on my way out of her house and said, "I'm taking your ugly tree with me!" Appalled, she snatched it out of my hand and yelled, "I paid 500 dollars for that!" You could have blown me over with a feather. To this day, I can't understand why someone would pay more than my rent for such an ugly tree. The rich are rarely sane though.

5) Every year at Christmastime, my Dad would take us kids out to the woods behind our house and let us pick a fresh tree. After much careful consideration we would point to the one with the appropriate thickness of branches, hoping it would be the one to make Mom happiest. Then Dad would chop it down and we'd help him drag it home. One year when I was about twelve, Dad took me and Mike aside and told us that we were going to pick out a fake plastic tree at the store that year. Oh, we argued and cried about how it was against tradition and the pine smell was so Christmasy with a real tree, etc. It wasn't until this point that Dad pointed out that every year at Christmas my Mom would get ill, and didn't we ever notice that it was because of the live tree? No, we hadn't realized that. We knew, of course, that Mom always suffered from springtime allergies. It just hadn't occurred to us that the fresh tree also caused her asthma to act up. She'd never complained about it. Ever. Mike and I felt really ashamed. We agreed to get the fake tree (which my parents still have). But that year I learned an important lesson; my mom loved us so much she willingly risked her life every year to let us have a fresh tree. It was the best present I ever got for Christmas.

I know that this topic is not really as exciting as it sounds at first. But the goal here was to write about things, any things. The song that was playing was "Fake Plastic Trees" by Radiohead and so I wrote about them. If the adage is true that a writer writes, then also true is the fact that a writer can write about anything.