Plants

FRIENDS AND PLANTS

Burt discovers that his friends don’t support him. When life gets difficult, he is as naked of real friends as the trees are of leaves in winter or the island of Ios is of vegetation

“Good God dad. The playoffs start in April. We’ve still got leaves on the trees.” 
(Ch. 1, page 18)

I paid for the beer and left. Outside, traffic, people and rain had all disappeared. It was kind of cold, and on the way home I noticed that I had been mistaken. The maples were naked, and their leaves had been neatly raked and carted away from the lawns. God I was out of touch!
(Ch. 1, page 22)

The island of Ios seems no different from the rest of the islands that encircle it. It’s just a rock surrounded by turbulent seas in the middle of the Aegean. You’d be pressed to spot a single tree, and if you did, then you can be sure that it’s been planted and watered with care by its patron.
(Ch. 2, page 24)

In Ios, Sid has both plants and friends while Charlotte has neither. In fact, she can’t even distinguish them

His window, being in the basement, was high up and faced a side alley but his windowsill was a plant shelf. His pot plants were vigorous and had been carefully lined up. (Ch. 6, page 65)

The paintings were quite good. They showed bare and desolate Ios landscapes. I am not an expert but I was pretty certain that they were hers. When I leaned closer I distinguished a tiny ‘Charlotte’ on the bottom left.
(Ch. 7, page 74)

She had more than thirty paintings, all with bare and desolate landscapes, or seascapes, of Ios. They were very good but I felt that something was wrong there. Something was missing.
(Ch. 7, page 76)

“Your paintings scared the hell out of me,” I said.
“I thought you liked them.”
“I do. But they’re dead. There’s not a living thing on any of them.”
“That’s Ios”
“No, it’s not. It’s what you see in Ios. You see the boulders but not the palm trees.” 
(Ch. 7, page 78)

Trees and plants, like true friendship, require hard work and effort to grow. In both accounts, success can only bring happiness

“Sid, you have a whole shelf of plants in your room. Sure they’re nice and green in a place full of rocks. But you can stick-up a poster of a forest, or get artificial plants. With real plants you’d have to water them and take care of them. Now why are you doing all that for? What do you want?”
“Nothing. I guess I just like to watch them grow, and I get happy.”
“Same thing here.”
“But you must know hundreds of people. And you can only be nice to a handful. Why have you chosen me?”
“Because you’ll be perfect for the job.”
“So will some of the others.”
“But you are my friend,” I said.
(Ch. 20, page 196)

I got out of there and walked towards the mooring. Someone had written "GREEN ISLAND" on one of the moles with spray paint. I laughed. Green island? Well, not exactly. I was standing on the very spot I had disembarked exactly a week ago. I looked around me at the mountains, the port, and the Village. They all looked far greener now than they did last week when I had first arrived. Maybe I hadn’t noticed the shrubs. But shrubs were shrubs. They’d dry up in the summer and by fall, the fierce northern wind would blow them away. In the winter, the gravel would be naked. Trees were far more interesting. They could outlast the winter. And now that I had lived here for a week, I knew that Ios had its allotment. There was a long line of them along the beach. The island’s hotels and camping grounds had a fair share and quite a few sprung up from in between the cubic houses. And there were of course many others that weren’t visible from here, but I had got to know. There was, for instance, the fig tree on the pass towards the lighthouse, the olive tree next to the cathedral and the palm tree near the top of the hill. Maybe this was a scant few compared with the trees you found in other places. But elsewhere water just poured from the sky and the trees grew and multiplied by themselves. That’s why the trees there, had no real value. They just covered the nakedness of the earth. Here they had to be planted and watered with care and attention.
To grow up here, they needed love.
In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to see how many trees I could spot among the crags.
(Ch. 20, page 198)

She believed in me.
And I believed in her. I really believed in her. And I was ready to work for her. I’d work so hard, I’d fill the goddamn lighthouse with fresh water and change the naked cove into a tropical island jungle! Make an oasis in the middle of the desert.
(Ch. 23, page 220)