People Family Generations
Seedlings, or What Has Been Passed On
Just like plants, we inherit some traits from those who came before us, but when I spend time with my siblings I’m amazed by how different we are.
In the morning, I looked at the lines of trees trimmed to equal height and width, their fruits hanging heavy with juice; others lay scattered on the Belgian soil, damaged, a feast for the insects. I squatted and observed the ants, dozens of them marching over the exposed pulp, the scent of sugars sailing in the air. Pears. A variety whose name I couldn’t recall, but that I’d seen all through my childhood years.
In an instant the image of my father came to me: eating a pear late at night after he’d come from work. This was before the extension of our house was built, before we owned our first car. I remember him eating the pear as if it were live prey, with large, wolf-like bites, slurping the juices. My brothers and I watched him in awe. He would always eat a pear standing up, I’m not sure why—perhaps because he’d been sitting behind a desk the whole day. It was the sound we marveled at. So much noise could only mean joy. We delighted while he devoured the pulp, smudging his mustache, because there was an intense, almost comical pleasure in seeing how he reveled in the act: unconcerned about appearances, with the kind of carefree attitude one dares expose only to family. People who can accept you as you are.
Beyond the trees I saw the Belgian plains known as the Pajottenland, west of Brussels, the same plains where Pieter Brueghel The Elder shuffled along with his easel and satchel full of brushes and dyes in the second half of the sixteenth century. He came to Brussels from Antwerp, the Flemish trading city lying at the mouth of the river Schelde, and he liked to sit down on a rock and peer into the distance, perhaps brushing some yellows and ochres on the canvas, trying to capture the life of the peasants ploughing the fields.
The orchard where I stood was only a section of a large garden, the Gaasbeek Museum Garden, itself part of a forty-nine-hectare domain in the municipality of Lennik. West of the gardens and half-surrounded by the remains of an old moat stands the Castle of Gaasbeek. With its several-inch thick walls, and built in the thirteenth century as part of a line of defense to protect Brussels from foreign invasion, the castle is a leviathan emerging from the depths of the Flemish soil.
For a few minutes on that Sunday morning the garden was open for no one but me. My friend Sarah, a volunteer at the Museum Garden, offered me a guided tour of the grounds, then let me wander around on my own. I strolled through the different sections of the open-air museum, stopping to admire the different varieties of tomatoes, some of which I had never seen or heard of, as well as the ornamental flowers with their petals like opened mouths welcoming a set of bumblebees, drunk-like creatures that hovered over the corollas in dizzying patterns. In the pale sunlight I watched them, their tiny hairy legs hanging from their oversized abdomens, before I moved on to the orchards, which were segmented in three areas, each containing trees of different heights. Against the white dividing walls I saw spiraling branches that were as thin as a wire, trees the shape of candelabras and daisy chains. Those were trees that had been pruned over and over again for space and fruit optimization, I read on a panel. The names of horticultural pioneers were listed, along with short biographical notes about their lives. I had to read and re-read the text—my Dutch rustier than I thought—before I sat down on a bench and began to trace contours on my scrapbook. My eyes were set in the distance.
*
In Andrea Barrett’s short story, “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,” the narrator reminisces about the time she spent as a little girl with her grandfather, a Czech botanist from Moravia who emigrated to the US via Bremen at the end of the nineteenth century. She calls him Tati, a corruption of the Czech word tatínek, meaning father, and Tati drags with him an invisible trunk swollen with memories from the old country. He teaches her the names of plants and trees. “ Hieracium,” he says, after a long walk when they spot several types of hawkweeds, “is a name that comes from the Greek word for hawk, the juice from the stem making one’s vision sharper.”
“The Behavior of the Hawkweeds” is a story about genetics and family relationships, about what we leave behind once we exit this world. The hawkweeds were important for him, Tati tells the narrator. With his own eyes, he had watched the hawkweeds ruin Gregor Mendel’s life. Tati had grown up in Brno and met Mendel in 1866, about ten years into Mendel’s experiments with peas. At the end of that year, Mendel sent a letter to Carl von Nägeli, a well known Swiss botanist interested in hybridization, and described what he was doing. Nägeli dismissed Mendel’s commentary on peas and instead prompted him to focus on the behavior of hawkweeds, which showed unpredictable results: hawkweeds can form seeds without fertilization. Discouraged, Mendel gave up his investigations and died in the seclusion of a monastery in 1884. He never knew what his research on peas would mean to the world.
While exploring Gaasbeek’s domain, I thought about Barrett’s story. In one of the explanatory panels I read: “It was only after the death of Jean-Baptiste Van Mons that it became clear how important his work had been.” Van Mons was born in Brussels in 1765, in what was then the Austrian Netherlands. He was passionate about the pear in all of its varieties and he is believed to have planted over 80,000 seedlings. Van Mons was a man who donated whatever possessions he had. He gave away trees and trees, shipped them to friends and colleagues in France and England, and always paid for the costs. Several of his gardens were destroyed, one by French soldiers, another expropriated to build a road over it. In Belgium, Van Mons is remembered for an action that went unnoticed during his lifetime. At the peak of his career he sent a seedling from his collection to the British Horticultural Society in London, where the pear later acquired the name of its chairman: Thompson Pear. In the mid-1900s, two centuries after Van Mons’ death, English botanists traveling through Flanders drove by the village of Vlezenbeek, and one of them knew where the Thompson pear had originally come from. They were surprised to learn that it had ceased to be grown in Vlezenbeek for many years and ordered to have a dozen seedlings be shipped from England. Thanks to Van Mons, Thompson pear trees can still be seen in several orchards in the Pajottenland.
Seated on a bench, I gazed into the distance and looked at the gift he had left behind.
*
My father cannot eat pears anymore, not the way that he used to. These days my mother cuts the fruit in small pieces and sets the plate in front of him at breakfast or dinner. He suffers from Parkinson’s disease and his limbs shake to different degrees, his right hand and leg the most. I saw both of my parents in September 2008 for the celebration of my older brother’s fiftieth birthday. I flew to Atlanta from Brussels—they, from Mexico. Seated at my brother’s kitchen table I watched my father eat a Thompson pear with a fork. From the corner of my eye I glanced at my brother and wondered: Does he, too, remember the past?
My mother has asked us to read the little booklet that explains all the stages of Parkinson’s, the degenerative consequences of the disease. “It’s important that you are prepared,” she’s told me. Sometimes I try to close myself off to reality, to push it out of my mind and pretend it’s never going to happen. Other times I try to—what? Other times I wish I didn’t live across the ocean.
Friends and colleagues came to my brother’s fiftieth birthday, a few of his neighbors, too. By the pool we cracked open dozens of beers, tried to seek some shade in the pounding heat of Georgia. As dusk was falling, a grey van parked in the visitor’s area and a group of mariachis stepped out. The traditional Mexican music began. Towards the end of the sixth song, I saw my father touching one of the violin players on the forearm, leaning over and whispering something in his ear. I watched my father lift his chin and clear his throat. He’s always enjoyed singing. It’s one of the passions he wished he had pursued as a young man. And his love of music has been passed on to both me and my brother. My brother took organ lessons and played the guitar; I went to the music conservatory. My brother’s children play several instruments. The love for music is a trait all seedlings in the family inherited.
Other times I wish I didn’t live across the ocean. At my brother’s kitchen table I watched my father eat his pear, a tiny cube of white pulp brought to his mouth, the slow laborious movements of his jaw. I enjoy those kinds of moments with my parents. Moments when life decelerates and conversations can drift over a doughnut and large cup of coffee, then a refill, and nothing has to be rushed. Both of my parents have become slower in their movements, my father’s decreased physical abilities more noticeable. “We have to be patient with him,” my mother has told me.
More laborious chewing and slurping. Thin lines of juice dripping down his chin. I glanced at my brother, wondered if he still remembered any of the things I remember from our childhood. My brother is recently divorced and has had serious disagreements with his ex-wife; he’s been struggling to get access to the children. Some of them don’t want to spend time with him. Whenever he tells us of his troubles, my mother’s face contorts. Why, she asks, why are the children behaving that way? What has my brother done to deserve that?
My father continued eating his pear. After a moment my brother stood up and picked up my father’s plate, two pieces of fruit still on it, and took it to the sink. “Let’s do something else,” he said. “We’ve been sitting for too long. Let’s go out.” My father had followed each of my brother’s actions with his eyes. For a moment he didn’t move. What was he feeling, I wondered, and should I ask my brother to slow down? My father wiped his mouth and nodded, stood up and continued nodding. “I’ll just go get my baseball hat.” He’d be very quick, he said. I watched him shuffle to the stairs, noticing the slight limp he has developed. What did he see on our faces back then, standing at the other end of the table and eating a pear, his children gaping at him? And what does he see now? Have we let him down or made him proud?
Sometimes I’m amazed at how differently my brother and I have reacted to my father’s illness. My brother becomes more impatient, less worried about what could happen in the future. The priority of his concerns seem to lie elsewhere. “Maybe it’s because you haven’t had children yet,” a friend told me. “When children arrive, your focus changes. Your parents become secondary, it’s inevitable.” I have no evidence to back his claim, no research I have collected, yet his assertion rings true to me. Children change your life, they rewire your brain. That’s what my friend said.
In “The Behavior of The Hawkweeds,” the narrator’s husband worries that their children might inherit his hexadactyly (six fingers). He feels anxious during each of his wife’s pregnancies, but none of their baby girls exhibit the condition. To his relief, the trait has not been passed on.
Sometimes I’m amazed at how differently my brother and I have reacted to my father’s illness. When I spend time with my siblings I’m amazed by how different we are. The blend of our parents and our parents’ parents, what has been passed on through generations, all of it manifested in different ways. Do my parents, I wonder, feel pride when they recognize one of their gestures in us, the way of answering the phone, the pitch of our laughter? Are they relieved when they notice we don’t carry a trait they’ve been laughed at for or felt embarrassed about?
*
When I return to Belgium I go for a walk in the Cinquentenaire park. I see young couples pushing prams, toddlers pointing at dogs then falling to the ground. The leaves are changing color. At the airport in Atlanta I had hugged my parents, reassured them more than once that they had nothing to worry about. I waved as they walked towards the security check, my father shaping his hand like a telephone and bringing it to his ear: “We’ll call you.” My brother stood next to me, often looking down at his phone; he hadn’t received news from any of his children.
In the park, I fill my lungs and look at the sun beyond the treetops, its warmth caressing my face. Whenever my brother tells me about the ways his children hurt him, I think of saying, Do you realize you’ve sometimes done the same with our parents? I think of saying, I love you and it pains me to see you like this, but is it possible that your children resent something you have done to them, something you are neglecting to see and accept? Instead I say, “Perhaps when they grow older they’ll realize they’ve been unfair to you. Remember how difficult I used to be with our parents? It took me some time.”
As a teenager I grew my hair down to my shoulders, went out with friends at night and never called my parents to report where I was. Teachers sent letters complaining about my conduct. The youngest of the children, I was a tyrant with my parents; I knew I could get away with anything. Only when I left Mexico did I understand the kind of sacrifices they had undergone to give me the best life possible, the severe difficulties they experienced, and the lengths they went to hide all that from me. Changes take time, I tell my brother. I had to confront adversity in life before I understood what my parents had done for love. And even if some of those memories from my teenage years will never be erased, I try to let go of the past and cherish every instant I have with them now. All of this I tell my brother, but it doesn’t seem to give him comfort. Perhaps he also needs time to realize why his children behave that way with him.
In the park, I continue my walk and on a bench I see a little girl seated on the lap of an old man. Pigeons are sauntering near them. My friends in Belgium say I am a calm person. “Are you more like your mom or your dad?” they ask. I didn’t used to be this way, I think of saying. I used to have a different temperament, someone whose erratic behavior seems so far from the person I am now. Foreign, yet the same one that writes these words. To my friends I answer, “My mom is patient and my dad is grateful.” That’s all I can say.
In the park I hear the breeze stroking the branches above me and I stop walking. I close my eyes and feel the wind entering my jacket, rubbing itself against my skin. I breathe in and listen to the sounds around me, the creaking of dry grass under someone’s feet, then I open my eyes. The leaves are changing color.
