My Mum is The Roger Federer of Chrysanthemums
And an internet virgin
My mother is 86 years old and until recently, was an internet virgin. She has long believed that if anything is worth knowing, it can be found in the Reader’s Digest issues from the 1960s. She has them all. Hardbound.
In her time, she was the Headmistress of a local school for over three decades and therefore is not an easy one to educate. I tried explaining Knock-Knock jokes to her last year and she nearly wrote me out of her will.
Last month, I decided to teach her how to operate an I-pad, with the sole objective of connecting the scattered family over zoom calls. I approached this project with a degree of trepidation since I was going to be instructing her over the phone. However, she displayed surprising, if not alarming eagerness to acquire this new skill.
When finished, hungry for appreciation, I queried, “So what part did you like the best?”
“Clearing the cache.” She deadpanned. She is the mother of Marie Kondo.
“What is the first thing you are going to do?” I pressed, genuinely curious.
“Put the phone down. It is hurting my arm.” Mike Tyson in the ring was friendlier than her.
Anyhow, she commenced her digital journey by googling Chrysanthemums. Mums! I tell you.
Now, I like flower porn as much as the next dude but I’m likely to get bored after the first three entries in the search results. It is the same flower in different colours and backgrounds, a trick easily accomplished on the free version of any photo-editor.
Four hours and 17 pages later, my Mom was still going strong, but she did sharply express disapproval, in her characteristic way.
“They have started repeating some flowers.”
Seriously!
To me, they are like tennis balls. I can’t tell two apart. It reminded me of the time I had to feign an interest in rocks. I was trying to seduce a budding geologist at the time. She wanted to rock and I wanted to roll but our fault lines were not aligned. As a result, I remained stuck between a rock and a hard place. My fortunes changed only when we got stoned together. You get the drift.
Suffice to say that flowers, balls and rocks occupy the same part of my cerebral cortex.
But, to be fair, my Mum is the Roger Federer of Chrysanthemums. She chairs the local horticultural society and is widely respected for having been published in the House and Garden issue of June 1983. Her vitriolic Letter to the Editor on composting techniques remains something of an academic reference within composting circles.
By day 2 of her internet journey, she had completely re-written the Wikipedia entry on Chrysanthemums.
If you are November born, this is your flower. It is the appropriate blossom for the 13th Wedding anniversary and the official flower of the city of Chicago. If all of that doesn’t float your boat, then get this: the official throne of the King of Japan is known as the Chrysanthemum Throne.
Try as hard as I may, I cannot get my mother to look at anything else on the internet. She lives for flowers. She does not even follow the news. When I brought up BLM in a conversation, I was shocked at her unawareness.
“What is BLM?”
Whaatt?
“Umm. Blue Lilies Matter. It’s a movement Mom,” I ventured teasingly, fully expecting to be caught out.
“Blue Lilies are ugly,” she declared professorially. “An anomaly of nature.”
Now it is empirically established that the three hardest demographics to argue against are Mothers, Floriculturists, and School Headmistresses. When you roll all three in one, epic defeats are guaranteed. But that has never stopped me from trying.
“That’s what they used to say about black swans.”
“Don’t be racist and don’t change the subject from lilies,” she admonished sternly.
Sensing impending doom, I rapidly changed gears and adopted a well-practised, deferential tone. “Mom, why are blue lilies an anomaly?”
Pleased with her little victory, she launched effortlessly into her monologue.
“There is no true blue pigment in plants, so plants don’t have a direct way of making a blue colour. To make blue flowers, plants have to be induced to perform a sort of floral trickery with a red pigment called anthocyanin.”
“That is so cool. I had no idea.”
“Don’t beat yourself. Most people don’t. Tomorrow I have to correct the Wikipedia page of Anthocyanins.”
