I must confess I was sorely tempted to publish a long-in-the-works, savage critique of the Internet this week. I have the photo ready and it’s clever and I really do make a lot of good points in that essay. But then of course, I’d have to post my critique of the Internet on the Internet. And no, the irony is not lost on me.
I may yet find myself compelled to post it sometime, but today it’s April and it’s raining in Michigan and I’m thinking instead of a story I read somewhere in the newspaper back in the days before we felt compelled to be in near-continuous profane communion with this other “web”.
Whoops. Darn. I slipped.
But anyhow, the story as I recall it from perhaps the mid-1990s was that a motorist on one of our local Detroit expressways found himself stranded with car trouble and happened to notice something odd growing off on the shoulder near where his vehicle broke down: a variegated forsythia. “Variegated,” for non-plant-folks, means a plant having leaves marked with patterns of white or a different color green. This feature is thought to have ornamental value, and I guess it is very unusual among forsythias.
Whether by pulling, cutting, or digging I don’t recall, but this motorist apparently obtained enough of the plant to propagate it. As the “discoverer,” he got to name the new plant variety. He called it Forsythia var. “Ford Freeway”.
Today if you do an online search you’ll find many nurseries that carry it.
But probably the reason I remember the story after all these years is because, here this person was having a classic crisis moment: Nobody wants to spend time on the shoulder of an expressway with a disabled vehicle. And yet, in the midst of that little emergency, he looked over and spotted something of value in his situation.
Just a guess, with a new potential plant cultivar in hand — a plant that today no doubt has pieces of it growing in thousands of yards across the country — the momentary blip of the car trouble he was experiencing suddenly was diminished in its importance. In fact, as the tow truck pulled up or the motorist resolved the car situation on his own, the mechanical failure and its inconvenience quite likely showed up as a blessing, instead.
Now, the takeaway for me here isn’t “every cloud has a silver lining,” though I see some value in the saying, and maybe as a saying it’s just been repeated so often that the deeper meanings don’t register with me anymore. Or maybe it’s because it’s overcast and raining here in Michigan right now and I don’t see any silver linings on these clouds. That said, I did appreciate the diffuse lighting and the raindrops on the flower petals when I took a photo of some forsythias a few minutes ago for this very posting, so there ya go.
But for me, this story is more about the irrepressible strangeness of life and how that strangeness is tied to both life’s abundance and its wonder, and how all of this tends to burble up — or sometimes tsunami — into our experience exactly when there’s a breakdown in our plans, our systems, our machines, our expectations or ideas, our relationships, and sometimes even breakdowns in our bodies. So, rather than the trite and overused “look for the silver lining,” I guess I’m goin’ a little more hardcore Motor City here, something like: “Look past the raised hood and steaming radiator of your life, my friends. Something new is trying to get your attention!”
Personally, I’m trying to remember this whenever things seem to be breaking down in my own life:
Thank you, busted car. Thank you, Ford Freeway.
Nice flowers you got there. Good thing I stopped to get a closer look.