Malinda Words: Touching the touch-me-nots

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 228th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

Years ago during a particularly corrosive period in the editorial offices of a Sunday newspaper, a young journalist, just 20, who had been at the receiving end of all kinds of invective, issued a challenge to his detractors.

‘Let us all write an essay on the coconut tree. We can get a few renowned writers to assess them. If I get the highest score, all of you should stop attacking me and if I don't then I will gladly suffer it all.’ Something to that effect, anyway.

Such challenges are never accepted and not on account of fear. My gut feeling is that he would have won. This happened more than fifteen years ago. The young man would later be appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of a national newspaper. An English newspaper, mind you.

It needn’t have been about the coconut tree, though. I am thinking right now about nidikumba and not on account of the above incident.

Mimosa pudica (from the Latin pudica which means, I just learned, ‘shy, bashful or shrinking’) is a plant of the pea/legume family, native to the Caribbean and South and Central America but is now a ‘pantropical weed.’ We call it nidikumba because it folds up instantly at touch. In other words it goes to sleep. In other parts of the world it is known as touch-me-not.

I thought of this weed because I remembered an indefatigable activist who battled a chronic kidney ailment that had forced her to get around in a wheelchair. Marion Jean Finley received a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry from Cornell University in 1975 and later, in 1983 completed her PhD at the same university in the field of Genetics.

Jean was an institution in Ithaca, New York. She attended rallies and demonstrations, hosted numerous radio and television programs; it is not that she made herself present, she was present. I never spoke with her. Our exchanges were limited to a smile and a nod.

Jean passed away on June 2, 2000, a few weeks before I left that enchanting town. I attended her memorial service. I remember just three things about it.

First, a young boy in a wheelchair came on stage to speak a few words about Jean. He wanted a friend to hold his hand. The only thing I remember of his short speech is the following:

‘She made it ok, for all of us,’ he said and broke down.

He was referring to his disability and the fact that Jean getting about in her wheelchair made it easier for people like him.
 

Second. Someone (I think it was her husband, Robert Godard Finley, who referred to the first person bio that students are required to write when they submit a thesis or dissertation. Jean had written, among other things, ‘I touched all the touch-me-nots.’

Clearly, it was not about mimosa pudika, the bashful weed that we call nidikumba. She was, simply, a radical. She questioned. She protested.

And the third: many who attended the memorial service cried. I did too.

There are, obviously, all kinds of touch-me-nots. Some we touch and some we do not. Years ago, I wrote of the latter kind and I feel Jean would have nodded and smiled if she read it. I called the poem ‘Moving sunsets.’

Smudged faraways
are for the impatient
they don’t recede as believed
but blur upon the decision to seek;
but then there are sunsets
that come seeking
for there are hearts
that respect
that touch not the touch-me-nots
not for fear or inability
or any reason that can be explained,
these are hearts protecting ember
from gushing water and howling wind –
sunsets come a-visiting
in the kindred ways of flame
for two hearts burn better
and warm the clarities of togethernesses
that were or will be
or simply
meant to be.

The young journalist was a touch-me-not toucher back in the day and even now. He knows enough of hearts and their ways to appreciate that sometimes the temptation to touch is resisted.

The young journalist, now a published author, political commentator and quite the social activist, if called upon to write an essay on nidikumba would gladly and enthusiastically do so. It would be different from my nidikumba story, but I am sure Rasika Jayakody would do much better.

04 October 2023

Touching the touch-me-nots

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