The Blue Spruce
by Martin Lindauer
For over 25 years, I had walked by the marble bench on the corner of the college, a gift to the village from a long-gone graduating class, but had never stopped to read the worn plaque bolted to its surface, either because I was late for class or in a hurry to get home for a cocktail that, hopefully, would wipe out the day’s frustrations of teaching uninterested undergraduates. But today was different, perhaps because I was retiring at the end of the semester and had become more aware of the passage of time.
I leaned closer to the memorial inscription, squinted at the blurred letters, and made out the date: 1943. My year of birth. I sat down on the cold granite slab and reflected on the coincidence, careful to avoid the pigeon-splatters on its weather-pocked surface, and pressing my shoulders against its unyielding back. I chuckled as I pictured myself perched on a resting place suitable for a graveyard.
A young woman, obviously a student by the clutch of books cradled in her arms, turned the corner and looked up, startled, at the unexpected sight of a stranger sprawled awkwardly on an stone ledge. I waved a friendly "hello," hoping to assure her that I was not a resting ghost. My eyes followed her as she hurried down a street lined with maple trees, their topmost branches silhouetted against the darkening late afternoon sky and interrupting irregularly sloped rooftops.
Amidst the ragged skyline I spied a silver blue-green spruce, its pyramidal shape defining the border between my property and the neighbors,’ a sight that made be think back twenty-five years. My kids, toddlers then, had helped me plant the spruce soon after we moved here for my first teaching job. The children followed me as I searched for the best spot to plant the sapling, purchased early that morning at the nursery.
“Gotta give the baby tree plenty of room to grow,” I told the youngsters.
Solemnly, they watched me dig a hole and sprinkle fertilizer into its base. I stepped back and let the two oldest, their hands barely circling the trunk of the evergreen, gently lower its roots into the musty earth. The boys kicked surrounding mounds of dirt into the hole while the more fastidious girls took turns watering the thirsty soil from a bucket.
"Let's see who grows faster," I said to the serious circle around the solidly set pine. "You or the tree." .... A quarter of a century later, from my solid seat on the corner, I noted the branches of the blue spruce thrusting past telephone wires and pushing against the clapboard sides of my house. They kids had grown up and gone away, I was divorced, and almost half the maples on the street, weakened by old age, had fallen in the bitter winter storms of upstate New York. Worn out student housing was fronted by raggedy lawns, the foundations pockmarked by gaps and cracks, and porches, softened by dry rot, leaned over unpruned shrubs. But my spruce proudly announced, “This is the professor’s house.” Its thick canopy of branches had shaded the front in scorching summers, intercepted the biting gusts of winter winds, softened spring downpours, and in the fall, when other trees had lost their leafy foliage, transformed my aging abode into a grand-looking residence. I saw smudges of greenery at the tips of spidery branches, anticipating spring, signaling of continuing growth, and the beginning of a new cycle. The tangled thicket of impenetrable stubs of branches at its base gave the evergreen an air of permanence, of having been there for a long time.
I pushed off my temporary resting spot and walked, slightly stooped, past wind-blown trash speckling the curb and front yards overgrown with weeds, and turned into my entranceway just before the blue spruce. I shuffled up the warped wooden steps of my sloping porch, my hand gripping a railing shuddering under my weight, ignored the peeling paint, and greeted Pavlov at the door. The Golden Retriever, unlike the rest of my family, had stayed with me. I petted the nearly blind and white-muzzled companion of my old age and sat down heavily on the chipped seat of the rocking chair, its squeaks accompanying the complaining creaks of my bones. I sighed, gazed up at the spruce, grateful that it would be here after I was gone.
Martin Lindauer has published short fiction, essays, and memoirs in Ha!, The Jewish Magazine, New Vilna Review, Oracle, Poetica, Shofar Literary Review, The Short Humour Site, Slab, and in several anthologies. Contasct Martin.
