On Names

Sally Bamboo is a dear friend of mine--the first plant I ever christened with a good, Christian name. Dear Sally arrived carefully packed as a birthday present from my oldest sister, to celebrate my twentieth year. For three years she adorned various Boston College dorm rooms, and each summer when I went home to Minnesota, my adorable Russian roommate would take Sally to her parents' home in Yonkers for some TLC and some borscht. She'd return in the fall greener and perkier than ever (the bamboo, not the roommate) and then, over the next nine months, get progressively droopier and paler from the lack of sunlight and the underlying tension. When graduation came, my little Ruskaya and I had both formed an attachment to Sally, so we decided that the most judicious thing was to divide her seven stalks and each take a part. It was a painful surgery if ever there was one, but now three-stalk Sally sits as close to the window as possible in my one-bedroom apartment (i.e. glorified dorm with nicer floors), growing paler and droopier as the months march on. I could never figure out how Mama Kouznetsova tended the plant to make her so happy, but I suspect it had something to do with beets or Russian murmuring or Moorlik, the family cat.