Oleander
For 25 years my father lived on a street named Oleander.
I spent some summers (mostly uncomfortable) in his house of cigarette smoke and loud talk radio.
I always left the place teary-eyed and coughing. The walk from the house to the car offered a brief release from the smoke, but that ended when we entered the car. Windows shut, the cigarette smoke rapidly filled that smaller space. The smoke snaked over the dashboard toward me. It slithered over my eyes, coating the left one (then the right) like rancid eye drops. Closing my eyes cooled them for a moment but only seemed to make the smoke absorb more thoroughly into my eyes. I inhaled it, too, but never seemed to feel the smoke in my system until the headache arrived.
My father left us in September, 2005, leaving me mostly responsible for the property on Oleander. A week of deep cleaning barely created the illusion that the cigarette stink was gone from his apartment.
Regarding the building on Oleander he had, over the years, sent me letters – bulletins – describing work and activities associated with the property. I never knew what he was talking about. New shingles. Evicted tenants. Landscaping. Garage door?
Those letters passed me by, the words swirling like cigarette smoke on the type-written pages.
For as long as I have known the word I assumed oleander was some pleasant flowery thing. Why would a city name a street Oleander if not for its innocuous pleasantry, like Maple and Elm?
The oleander plant is beautiful, it turns out. It is also insanely poisonous:
“Every part of the plant is dangerously poisonous, and death has occured from using its wood for skewers in cooking meat.”
The word “Oleander” is virtually synonymous in my mind with my father. To me it was practically his middle name. I never knew the full name of the street – Oleander Drive? Avenue? The letters I sent him never included that designation, nor did the return address on his letters. By addressing letters simply to “Oleander” I felt I was letting it go with a lift, or a knowing flourish.
The street itself confused me. I would drive to my father’s house, looking for Oleander, thinking that once I found the street I would have no more turns to make. Then I would encounter Oleander’s off-balance 4-way intersection that forced me to turn the wrong way. I never remembered that turn in the road until I got there.
Researching the word “oleander” in botanical resources feels creepy. It is almost like I’m digging up new information about him. He, too, probably would have defined “oleander” as some kind of frilly plant.
The technical name of the plant Nerium oleander reads like his forgotten middle name. Nerium? Some people called him Tom but no one called him Nerium.
Months after he died I typed his name into the Internet, looking for the obituary my cousin and I wrote for his birth town newspaper. I did not find it, but I had no reason to presume it would have washed up on the Internet. Instead of the obit I found a bullet-point paragraph he sent to the alumni newsletter of the military academy he attended in east Tennessee. It skips many things (of course), but it also reveals things about him I never knew:
“Served 23 years U.S. Army retired 1077 as CW3, MI. US Army Security Agency, Chitose, Japan 56-59, Army Attaché Office, Vientiane, Laos 59-60, Army Attaché Office, Brussels, Belgium 61-64, Defense Attaché Office, Warsaw, Poland 65-67, DAO, Accra, Ghana 68-70. Cross trained as investigator 1970 and assigned Washington, DC. Joint Army Navy Air Force Attaché Office, Vientiane, Laos 73-75. Defense Investigative Service Field Office, Tampa, FL 75-77, retired. Hired as civilian special agent July 78 with service in Tampa, Valdosta, GA and Daytona Beach. Numerous temporary assignments such as Miami, Key West, Cape Canaveral, Chicago, San Diego, Pasadena and Las Vegas. Married 62 at Brussels, Belgium. Two children, Diane now 35 and a free lance medical transcriptionist in South Florida and son Mark, 30, a webmaster for Time Warner in New York City — anybody@sorabji.com, recently featured on ABC News. I retired from civil service in 92 and pass time traveling and attending to four rental properties in Daytona area. Would love to hear from former cadets CHMA.”
I do not remember anything about the “numerous temporary assignments” or the cities to which these jobs sent him. He once mentioned Las Vegas in passing when I spent a week there in 1995, but I did not have the impression he spent significant time there. I know we stopped in Las Vegas on our cross-country Winnebago trip in 1973, but we just passed through.
“CW3, MI,” means Chief Warrant Officer 3, Military Intelligence. He was in cryptology, or “crypto” as he called it. He long claimed to have intercepted and decoded coded communiques from the communists while stationed on an Army ship near Chitose, Japan, in the 1950s. I do not know how true or how significant that story is. Facts learned in the 2½ years since he died have helped confirm my lifelong suspicion that he tended to exaggerate.
I remember dad talking about catching up with fellow alumni from his military academy and even his grade school. I didn’t think much of it until I realized that he did not really know anybody from those days, and that he hoped to rekindle friendships with people he had not seen since he was 10.
