A Little Frazzled but not Bamboozled by a Breeze

(Lindsay)

Bamboo has to be one of the most useful of plants. It is far more pliable and has greater tensile strength than steel. Besides being an ornamental grass, it is an effective hedgerow. On Chinese rivers, lengths of bamboo are tied together to make rafts. It is sliced into strips that are used to weave baskets, and wider strips that are used to make straps from which to carry the baskets. It is lashed together to form fences, scaffolding, even entire buildings. Bamboo shoots are a delicacy in Chinese cuisine. You can carve bamboo into flutes and figurines, it is woven into steamers for cooking and it can be cut into 10-inch lengths and hollowed out to make tea caddies.

Recently I became thoroughly indebted to bamboo. Having carefully studied how my neighbors hang their clothes out to dry, I gave up on the apartment’s electric dryer and hung my laundry from the rods outside my seventh story window. I decided to be sophisticated about the matter and go teach my classes rather than sitting by the window to make sure that my laundry didn’t blow away. Biking home, however, I noticed with great consternation that the breeze had picked up considerably, and when I entered my apartment and rushed to the window, I found to my horror that my laundry had taken flight. So had much of my neighbors’ laundry, which, with most of mine was decorating the bushes in the courtyard below. This I could easily retrieve. My pajamas, however, had landed on the awning over the apartment windows below, six stories up. 

I went down to the courtyard behind the building and collected my laundry from the bushes and trees, but I had no idea how I was to get my PJs from the awning. I looked around and found a 7-foot-long, bamboo pole. Angling it just so, I got it into the elevator and then through the apartment. I lowered the pole out of the window as far as I could reach, but even were I to hang by my toes from the window sill, I could not have reached the awning below. The pole was much too short. Clearly it was time to enlist the aid of the building superintendent, regardless of the difficulties in explaining my predicament. The superintendent doesn't speak one word of English, and I know all of five Chinese words, none of which are “my laundry blew away.” 

It’s never hard to find the superintendent; he’s always somewhere around the front of the building. Sure enough, that’s where I found him, and after some charades on my part, he understood the problem. Once I showed him where my PJs were stranded, he rushed back downstairs to the dark space behind where the residents park their bikes and emerged with an even longer bamboo pole and some old, plastic, packing twine. Bowing the pole to get it into the elevator, he brought it up to the seventh floor hallway and there lashed one end to an end of the pole I had found. He then threaded this very long proboscis through the apartment and out the window and was easily able to flick my PJs off the awning. The building super is a very resourceful man, who easily would have earned a boy scout’s merit badge for knots; after bringing the poles back through the window, he pulled one end of the twine he’d used to lash the poles together, and they quickly came apart. As I happily retrieved my PJs, I wondered how long it’s going to take Home Depot to move into the 21st century by stocking bamboo.