On a Tuesday in July, Frankie brought change in a cardboard box.
He boarded the 7:10am Daly City train and settled in for his daily commute: in his lap, six red Solo cups full of soil and saplings; in his backpack, a Zip-Loc bag hosting a summer’s worth of Buena Mulata peppers.
At 8:04am, he walked into Room 122, as his classmates caught up on last night’s Barcelona game, compared senior year course schedules, and tried their best to squeeze in a few extra minutes of sleep. While Cheese and I fiddled with the projector and made a few frantic edits to today’s college essay workshop, he took his usual seat (third row, just a few feet off-center) and planted the entire collection on the desk, right next to his Chromebook and his half-asleep friends.
I stopped mid-edit to say hi (no matter how busy you are, never pass up an opportunity to chat with Frankie). I asked him the usual questions: How’s your mom? How’s the SAT prep going? Are these pepper plants for your friends?
He responded with a question of his own: “Do you want one, too?”
Historically, I have struggled to keep things alive. My first and last childhood pet, a goldfish, starved after I forgot to feed it before a four-day Big Bear trip; in college, the fern plant I bought at a farmer’s market withered on my dorm-room windowsill before reaching adulthood. As an adult, I vowed that the only animals I’d take care of would be the stuffed variety, a compromise that has proven wise as I’ve learned to juggle a full-time high-school job and never-ending errand lists.
I could give you all the pop-psychology explanations: my ADHD constantly redirecting me to random thoughts, my never-ceasing anxiety around doing things the right way, my brain’s stubborn refusal to follow routines or instructions. None of that spared me from the sting I felt imagining the fate of Frankie’s Buena Mulata plant in my hands. I imagined it, like so many other house plants, sitting neglected on my living-room bookshelf as Cigna bills and coupon books slowly encroached on its territory. I imagined its leaves yellowing, then crumbling to powder. I knew the responsible answer here. I had to save my precious student’s livelihood from an undeserving death.
Naturally, I said yes.
“You said yes?” JT confirmed, as I shrugged my backpack onto the floor and plunked our new housemate onto the kitchen counter. “Isn’t this a pepper plant? We barely ever eat spicy food!”
Of the many things I love about my fiance, here’s one: he’ll poke all the holes in my nonsense, then choose to follow me into it anyway.
“I couldn’t say no,” I admitted. “But hey, this could be fun! Maybe we can ask Megan if she’ll let us use some of the soil in the yard? Or we just keep it on the counter so we can water it? Oh gosh, I should probably ask Frankie how much I need to water this thing, shouldn’t I?”
The plant never made it outdoors and I never bothered to ask or research. What was meant to be its temporary home – the corner of the kitchen windowsill, right behind the Zojirushi hot water dispenser and our hanging dish rack – is where it remains, to this day. But we were fathers now, and god damn it, I was not letting my student down.
So yes, we remembered to water it, if nothing else. Sometimes I gave it a little sprinkle as I scrubbed yesterday’s dishes; sometimes JT took over on the mornings I had to rush out of the house with half a bagel shoved into my talking hole. Early signs were not good: we learned the dangers of over-watering when we discovered mold on the soil’s surface. Leaves that had been green turned the shade of mustard. As it grew taller, one of its three branches began sagging, threatening to pull the entire thing into the grave. I stared at the poor thing, struggling to hold onto life, and wondered why I’d ever bothered.
But then one sleepy morning in August, I stumbled into the kitchen, ready to give my child its daily sprinkle, and discovered tiny flowers blooming all over the branches.
Five days later, many of them had withered away, but two flowers evolved into peppers. Instead of the vibrant crimson beauties I’d choked on in front of twenty teenagers during Summer Academy, these were closer in shade to the Hamburglar. No matter. JT and I had pulled off a heist: for once, something under my care had cheated death.
I finally decided to update Frankie: during one of our September check-ins, I carried my laptop over to the kitchen and tilted the camera towards the windowsill. He grinned: “They’re getting bigger! That’s nice!”
“Sorry that I didn’t ask earlier,” I asked, “but is there anything I should do now? Do you think it needs a bigger pot? Or maybe I should feed it sugar or something?”
His answer was simple: “No need to do anything special. Just keep giving it water…and lots of sunlight.”
It turns out, sleeping through 7th grade biology had consequences. All this time, I’d seen myself as a deadbeat dad, measuring myself against other, better plant parents: fathers who lavished their plant children with only the finest grass-fed fertilizer and took time off work to attend their plant ballet recitals and used Korean at home while their young plant brains were still plastic enough to pick up a second language without trying. So when I finally took 2 minutes to Google “how plants grow” and found out plants don’t even need food – apparently they just make their own by sucking sunlight into their leaves and using it to turn water and carbon dioxide into sugar?! – I was, to put it mildly, regretful I hadn’t heeded Ms. William’s repeated requests to please pick my head off the desk, I’d want to know this someday.
Sure, there’s always room to learn the best practices, but in parenting terms, our pepper plant was pretty much a self-starter. We weren’t bad dads: what we’d been doing had been more than enough.
I wish human growth could be this easy. I wish all it took to thrive was making sure to hydrate and get enough vitamin D. I wish I hadn’t talked myself out of applying to that creative writing workshop freshman year of college, convinced my peers were too talented for me to stand a chance. I wish I hadn’t spent two decades of my life denying myself the opportunity to date or love other men, just so I could keep my secret safe and my parents happy. I wish my dreams of being creative, of making and sharing art and cultivating the right kind of space to do it in community with other people, weren’t constantly deferred by late nights and last-minute emergencies at the office. I wish I could learn Spanish and become a beekeeper and finally perfect my soondubu recipe and still get 7 hours of sleep. I wish I had the stability and resources to raise a real child, not a plant or plushie, someday. I wish I weren’t full of aspirations I’ve buried prematurely because I didn’t think I was good enough to even try.
Historically, I have struggled to keep things alive.
Yet as I write this from the kitchen counter, it’s been four months, and our plant has yielded four beautiful Buena Mulatas, three of them now the right shade of red to pluck. As I see our fruit blooming, its colors and flavors growing deeper and richer, I think of who I was before Frankie offered me a chance in a Red solo cup: somebody who would have said no, who would have hidden behind humility, who would have taken himself out of the game before he had the chance to fail. I don’t think I want to be that guy anymore. I want to do the little scary things, so someday I can do the big scary things, too. I want to tend to my aspirations the same way I tend to my students, my fiance, and all the people I love.
Tomorrow, I’ll meet my new community college advisor, and finally sign up for the Intro to Film class I’ve been eyeing for months. I’m going to ask JT to free up Fridays so we can go to ballroom dance sessions together. And I’m going to save one of those pepper seeds, wash out the planter our landlord offered us, and get that rooted in time for the spring. The winter solstice is just a month away; the days will get longer and warmer if we’re willing to wait.
The older I grow, the heavier the world feels on my shoulders. Sometimes it’s enough to drag me – and all my untamed branches – underground.
But deep down, my hope remains, a seed buried in the soil.
All I need is to water it daily.
Mo Kim 
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