Strings Attached

As Pressing Is to Flowers

6 As Pressing Is to Flowers The only precious thing I own, this pressed flower tray from Lebanon, where trays like this are made by people with names like Hajaili, my Lebanese name which I recently discovered translates to Partridge. So I’m from the Partridge family, but my last name, Shipley, after my grandfather’s middle name. It’s no wonder I’m a girl with no sense of direction, map challenged, who cherishes the inheritance of a tray from a father who wanted me to come to Lebanon to marry my intended . . . well, his intended—a good Druze man. Under my breath I’d sing a good “Druze” man is hard to find —especially since I lived in Detroit, and was baptized Unitarian. We served meals on this tray— snacks and drinks the Lebanese artisan wasn’t picturing when she pressed oval glass over a micro meadow of wheat stalks and wildflowers gathered from the Bekáa valley. Flowers that inherited yellows, pinks, and violets—somehow remembering their genomes even as they fade. Often we poured Maxwell House, not rich Turkish coffee, cardamom flavored and with a cup-reading at the end—a bonus like the prize in Cracker Jack, back when they gave ornate bird whistles and decoder rings, not the disappointing paper thingies you get today. Usually, Lipton, not meghle, tea brewed with cinnamon sticks, ginger, anise, and orange rind studded with cloves—its exotic bouquet wafting from the kitchen like a belly dancer’s scarves. I say Maxwell House coffee is to Turkish coffee as Twinkies are to baklava, crisp Lebanese baklava made with chopped pistachios, drizzled with fragrant rosewater syrup. I must admit I’ve always loved those little sponge cakes—felt bad when the company went bankrupt. Twinkies are to America as stability is to Lebanon, though arguably since they’re preserved to last forever. But 7 this tray, the one thing I took when I left home, is my only palpable connection to my father, a man my New York mother married in Beirut, a good Druze man who shouldn’t have been intended for her. I say rubble is to buildings as marriage is to parents, as pressing is to flowers, as flowers are to fading, as fading is to what remains. ...