Potted Payback

A full moon is nothing compared to the first full day of sunshine after a winter full of sullen snowflakes to make people act crazy. The first day I looked to the heavens and felt the sunshine warm my face with magic fingers, I knew it was time to murder more houseplants.

If Christmastime is the season of Poinsettia Slaughter, then March brings Geranium Massacre Madness. Garden shops are teeming with folks loading up their carts with future victims. Satellites overhead are busy transmitting my picture to plant nurseries across the country: Armed and dangerous. Spotted with peat moss and a trowel. Before nightfall my mug shot will be hanging over the succulents at Home Depot stores everywhere.

I still have three house plant survivors from the Flora Trail of Tears that so many African Violets and Swedish Ivy cuttings have taken over the years, across my kitchen counter to the waste bin outside my back door. The road is difficult and tortuously long, but I have faith enough to keep widening the road and beginning beautification projects along its borders.

Just now I’m rubbing my hands together and gazing lovingly at two jade plants and an aloe, ripe for repotting. I think my neighbors phoned in a tip to CSI. Helicopters hover over my house. SWAT teams are rappelling down the chimney. Hostage negotiators are ringing my cell phone. “Back away from the potting soil and nobody will get hurt.”

With sunshine streaming in between the blinds, I lock the door and carefully spread newspapers across the table. Is it a bad omen that I have selected the obituary page for this project? I turn the paper over to government news. Somehow that seems more fitting for the spreading of manure.

My sons, both avid participants in Role Playing games, roll their dice to determine my luck. Hmm, Critical Fail. Yeah, but naysayers told Christopher Columbus to turn left at Nova Scotia, too. If he had listened, we wouldn’t be sucking the cream filling out of cannolis today. Sometimes you just have to stick to the North Star and make sure you have the right ratio of dirt to fertilizer.

Thirty minutes later the deed is done. I fling open the back door and announce, “The transplant was a success!”

Then I trip over the old pots on the back step and land with an overly large crash in the trash can by the door. Picking peat moss out of my hair and feeling a bruise the size of a dieffenbachia on my backside, I realize something important.

The Trail of Tears has claimed another victim.

Not Working

I’ve been watching the deal Conan O’Brien made with NBC and I’m not afraid to say that he’s an inspiration. He’s gathering millions of dollars to leave his show and not be the Tonight Show host. He might be allowed to take a late-night seat as early as September, but until then he’s hauling in big bucks like a half-ton hauls manure, not to work.

I’ve decided that for my next career move, I'm going to not be a secretary. I thought about not being a late-night talk show host, but there appears to be too much instability in the field. Not to mention competition for the unavailable openings. And I could use some of the secretarial experience I've saved up during the last 20 years fighting the copier wars in my new position of not being one.

There also appears to be a lot more people interested in where you'll be doing your "not a late night talk show host" work as opposed to people who are interested in the activities of your "not secretary" work, who are mainly the people who call on the phone to offer you insurance or sell you a copier or ask you to change your phone service. As far as not being a secretary goes, I'll make less money, but I feel there will be less stress in not filing than in fretting about career advancement opportunities that are not available in television. I’m not sure how long you have to be Conan before you get to be Oprah, and I don’t want to find myself lying around the house moping about the whole thing.

I thought about not being an accountant, but I really don’t care for higher mathematics. I don’t even like to carry in the groceries, much less a carry a one over into the tens column. That’s just too much responsibility for me.

I could not be a waitress, but what if I didn’t drop the Lobster Ferragamo in somebody’s lap? I’d probably end up not getting fired and not going broke and not losing my house. I’d never get over it.

So before long, late night TV will be back the way the good Lord and NBC intended, Conan O’Brien will be cashing his unemployment checks, Jay Leno will be in his old chair, and David Lettermen will be cashing in on the whole deal.

Meanwhile there are worse things. The late-night talk show brigade could not be the head programmers at NBC. Come to think of it, neither should the folks who really are.

Perhaps they could all get jobs not working in Homeland Security.