Episode 1--The Man-Eating Plant*

So, here is how I became apprised of this rather peculiar...situation concerning my ficus.

I was chatting at an office party recently with Tom, an attorney about as attractive and charismatic as he is funny (and no Mom he is not single, he is quite happily married with two lovely children thank you very much for asking.) --Sorry for the aside, but given Mom’s perpetual penchant for hopeful fantasizing along these lines I just knew what was coming.

In the course of our chat I mentioned that I would be taking off a week to attend to some things back home that needed...well, attending to.

Tom, catching ahold of some admitted deliberate ambiguity, ventured that perhaps the thing I meant chiefly to do at home was to take care of a certain ‘Man-Eating Plant' I had there. Such herbiage, he mused, could easily require a week’s full attention.

Now, normally I would have laughed at a comment clearly meant to be funny. In this case, I experienced a rather different reaction--at first surprise, then something else--instant recognition. As ridiculous as it sounds, you see--while I do not actually have a plant back home capable of that kind of cannibalistic behavior, I actually do have a rather large, and lately strangely thriving ficus.

I say strangely, because while I help to run and administer a blogsite called GreenCityBaltimore (http://greencitybaltimore.org/ ), I admit to being quite shockingly (and fatally) unskilled horticulturally-speaking. In fact, almost every plant that has been gifted to me by friends and/or guest-acquaintances (I do not undertake such plant-tending ventures on my own) has sadly found its way, at some inevitable time, down the ‘throw-away’ chute of my building.

On the other hand, the ficus (technically a tree, not a plant, if you note the wikipedia definition supplied here) bequeathed on me as an optimistic housewarming gift by my real estate agent, Betsy, really has proven quite unusually hardy.

Of late, though, I had sort of noticed that it (the ficus I mean) had developed a particularly jaunty sort of way of wearing its...hat.

"Wait--hat?" You might say. As well you should. "Since when does a ficus wear a hat?"

...Well, to this I will answer that it is a sort of blue Polo cap and if there was anything rather unusual about a ficus wearing one the thought had never before occurred to me. I tend as a whole to be about as indifferent and oblivious to such matters as I am about housekeeping and also about the strange eccentric but generally pretty charismatically attractive single men who sometimes, over the course of two years, have made very very brief 'guest' appearances in my life and my apartment and then disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.

Quite frankly, I have rarely had much time to concern myself at all with it, I have been so very busy with social activities and community work and running the GreenCityBaltimore blogsite and such things as that.

After Tom’s comment though, I could not help but connect the two phenomena. It occurred to me, at that moment, that I had perhaps seen that cap on someone else some months back before I first noticed it perched on the ‘head’ of my ficus.

Come to think of it, a rather specific someone...and not only did I never hear from him again after his initial apartment-visit, I don’t quite remember him ever leaving my apartment.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought that perhaps I had, at last, struck upon a theory which was–well, if not exactly comforting, still rather satisfying at least in its ability to explain a few things. At least, if true, I could finally answer those pesky questions sometimes posed to me–by my Mom, by a few friends/ acquaintances along the way–about why I do not ever seem to have, or keep, any visible men in my life–although I personally know that they do sometimes find their way into my apartment.

The plant! Of course, the plant! It is the fault of that foolish, blood-thirsty, man-eating plant! Well, ficus, tree, plant, what’s the difference? The point is, I finally had an acceptable explanation!

Being hopelessly civic-minded, I figured I had no choice but to file a report with the proper authorities. They came, looked around a bit–doubtfully, really–swiped the hat and took DNA samples. (They did me the favor of loaning it back to me briefly so my ficus could model it once again for my Blogshow–see the second main photo on the right column of my Blog, in which the ficus can be spotted, if you look carefully, actually grinning.) The results are pending.

I am somewhat hopeful, perhaps more than I ought to be. With a crime problem as big as Baltimore’s (a city I love and so am sorry to have to admit to this), the reported disappearance of a few strange, eccentric, attractive single men from a single gal’s apartment is bound to rank a little low in their priorities.

Still, at least the report has now been made and the wheels of justice are turning, and moreover I now know enough to keep any men who might find their way in from here on out far away from the herbiage, and to watch both their entry and their exit more carefully.

Live and learn, isn't that way they say? ...Well, not so much for a few of my 'male guests' in the past tense perhaps, but in the end, really at this moment (at least until the test results are in) only my ficus knows the truth of it. I will of course apprise readers of any further 'green-crime' domestic developments. Crime of any sort, even of the potentially plant-committed variety, is simply not something to be taken lightly.

Until then, I will continue to tend, as best I can, to my ficus. Men are men, after all--they come and they go--but with 'green' things I figure I have at least an obligation to try as best I can, for once, to help things that were flourishing continue to flourish.

Copyright 2008 by Lois

*Some elements of this particular LL Sitcom may have been, and probably were, fictionalized. The ficus is real, although it now favors modeling ladies' shoes over men's caps. For more on this (even more alarming development) see my second comment below.