We spent the first few weeks of June in Tennessee. The kids were done with school, my work allows me to work from roughly anywhere, and my in-laws are just about a thousand miles from here—a long day's drive. For a person with twenty or so bonsai trees, a summer trip is risky. The miniature trees have very small root masses in small pots of fast-draining soil. Between the water each tree needs to perform its energy transforming photosynthesis and the added hours of sunlight towards the end of June, my daily watering becomes twice-daily watering. Peter Chan, the sage of western bonsai, dryly notes in one of his books that most bonsai gardeners prefer to vacation in the winter.
Technology came to my rescue. Earlier in May, we'd decided to not put in the vegetable garden and give that patch of soil a break, and so the garage was full of sprinkler and drip line equipment. A week or so before we left for Tennessee, I charged up the solar-powered watering timer and set about putting drip emitters and small sprinklers on the bonsai benches. It took a few permutations to get it right, but when it was right, what a sight to behold: twice a day the little tubes and misters gave all the trees the right amount of water to see them through the summer. I drove off for Tennessee pretty happy that the trees would do their growing just fine under the early summer sun. Due to this and that, I ended up leaving the automated watering system in place all summer long. A few times, when it rained, I turned the automation off for a day or two, skipping a watering here and there. Being a dry summer, I hardly had to do that. When I joined my Dad for the annual golf extravaganza or camped in Acadia or was gone all day for summer camp drop-off, the sprinklers did their thing and the trees kept chugging along.
I've enjoyed my little trees since right about the time we moved to Massachusetts, probably eight or nine years. (My oldest tree, an indoor ficus, was a Father's Day 2016 gift.) Like any software worker, I enjoy the hobbies that take me into the real world—smelly summer fertilizer, sharp scissors for the constant pruning, and the dry soil of calcined clay and bark shreds—it's delightfully analog. The books I have are decades old; the winter-long YouTube tutorials, while new, describe techniques hundreds of years old. While my tree collection isn't all that beautiful (the few that have appears in our church's art show were charity selections, to be sure), it's a collection of artistic ideas made real over years of growth. There are merits and demerits to the time involved: mistakes in pruning stare right back at you forever; visions that take multiple years to achieve seem to be perpetually in-progress. It can be daunting to know that my white pine won't really turn out for another decade. There's a whole lot of repotting, watering, fertilizing, and pest-fighting between now and then—and my plan for it might end up being ugly! Like I said, I enjoy the hobby.
It was surprising, then, that when I had to move the collection a few times to make room for some improvement work on the chimney at that end of the house, I got annoyed enough to wonder why I still kept at it. What sort of amateur enthusiast wonders if he should give it up? This summer had been the easiest of all: with the new automated watering system, all the work I had to two was the biweekly liquid fertilizer and the monthly solid fertilizer! When in years past I'd spend July and August watering multiple times a day, weeks went by this year wherein I barely paid any attention to the trees at all. Sure, I'd saved some time (ten minutes, twice a day) and some stress (did they need a noon watering?), in cutting out a daily visit to the bonsai garden, I'd cut myself off from the enjoyment of the hobby itself. I'd gone from practitioner of the ancient art to a person who had trees. The technology, perhaps necessary during our trip in June, not only wasn't necessary while we were at home, distracted me from the whole reason to keep these trees in the first place: I keep them as a leisure practice—it's a thing I actually want to do. Why would I employ a system to help me not actually do it?
Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
"Writing is the way people figure out what they think, and how to convey those thoughts to someone who doesn’t already share them. Cal Newport, a computer-science professor at Georgetown University, argues that the process of writing forces people to think in an orderly, linear fashion. It exposes flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning."
After 491 pages, the reader comes to the final two words in John Updike’s magisterial In the Beauty of the Lilies: “the children.” The words are stated without emphasis or misdirection, except from the high ground of grief: “the children,” those holy innocents born into the bad new days of what seems to be a doomed American quest, a reckoning, and what could be read as a self-glorifying death wish since what passes for religion can only cult-like culminate in violence.
Even so, those words at the ending, “the children,” are John Updike’s idea of a happy ending.