The True Adventures of The Professor and Dr. Cheung

This is a tale about two intrepid plants, a dracaena (The Professor) and a spineless yucca (Dr. Cheung). It started when an acquaintance got her Ph.D. and left her large "corn plant" dracaena to me when she moved away to become a professor. I brought The Professor to work, where it was very happy despite the lack of windows. Flourescent lighting must have agreed with it. It sat there happily with a number of other plants, including November, a large peace lily someone had abandoned outside which I had resolved to take home if it were still outside on the first of November. And then along came Dr. Cheung.

At my previous job I one day saw someone carrying the sawed-off top of what I thought was a dracaena, and I offered to take it. My coworker also gave me the stump in a ceramic pot that weighed approximately fifty-eight pounds, give or take a ton. I put the very tall top (maybe four feet) in a vase, but it rotted so I cut it back and stuck it in the pot, where it happily rooted. Meanwhile the bottom had sprouted, so instead of one tall plant, I had two short ones. Everyone said to me, "That used to be Dr. Cheung's plant," so I took to calling it Dr. Cheung. Then one day Hardingfele lent me a plant book, and I realized Dr. Cheung was not a dracaena at all but a desert cousin, the yucca. No wonder it rotted in the vase of water!

When I got a new job across the street from my old job, there was an actual window in my office, but not enough room for plants as large as November, The Professor, and Dr. Cheung. One day Hardingfele and I carried them to her office, where she had a lot of window space; November got sicker and sicker until this present day, when it is recuperating in Plant World; but The Professor and Dr. Cheung were happy as could be in a southern exposure window. Then Voodoo Head did his magic and Hardingfele got a new job, so we moved The Professor and Dr. Cheung to the spacious elevator lobby near my office, which is nothing but windows. The Professor and Dr. Cheung were so happy! They basked in the sunlight and photosynthesized.

Meanwhile, Hardingfele had a scraggly poinsettia she had rescued from the cafeteria after Christmas last year, and a few days ago she stuck it in the elevator lobby next to my two plants instead of dragging it all the way to her new job in this cold weather. Nobody had said a thing about The Professor and Dr. Cheung brightening up the elevator lobby, but yesterday the chair (let's call him Dr. Trainy) asked if the plants were mine.

"They look trashy," he said. I owned up to being responsible for The Professor and Dr. Cheung but would only say the poinsettia had been "left there" by somebody. However, I did promise to get all three of them out of there. So last night Hardingfele and I drove to my job, and she carried Dr. Cheung in the 56-pound pot although I said we could use the mailcart. ("I needed the workout anyway," she grunted as she hoisted Dr. Cheung.) I carried The Professor, and her seven-year-old kid carried the poinsettia, which Hardingfele christened Trainy in honor of the man who had exiled the plants. We carried the plants through a driving November rain, brought Trainy to Hardingfele's new job and The Professor and Dr. Cheung to Plant World, which was already quite crowded. It took some creative rearranging to get those two great big plants in there! But now the adventures of The Professor and Dr. Cheung, who have heretofore led more exciting lives than some people I know, have given way to a peaceful existence. Like Bilbo returning to the Shire, they can dream about their past adventures, or maybe they don't give a rat's patootie as long as they can photosynthesize. Which they most definitely can in Plant World, and they have a history of liking fake light as much as sunlight anyhow.

Famous Hat