Save Paul the plant

I bought a new plant when my parents were here this sumer. Since my father carried it more than mile from the Home Depot to our apartment (whilst my mother and I divided the weight of a watermelon carried from a neighboring farmer's market), Wes and I thought it only appropriate it to name it after my dad. But Paul hasn't been doing so well recently. He was strong through the summer months but has begun to fade recently. We've tried mroe and less water. More and less sunlight. But Paul keeps losing leaves. Paul is pitiful. How do I save Paul?

To appropriately contextualize Paul's trials, I share with you here a short essay I wrote this summer in Iowa about my struggles with plants, particularly those I name.

I have always liked naming things. When I was a little girl, my stuffed animals and baby dolls had names like Harry and Ernie and Angelcake. When I was a teenager, I helped my sister rename the dog almost every month until my mom told us to give it a rest before the dog had an identity crisis. When I was a college student, I would spend great effort titling my papers, mastering the use of the colon. Now as a married woman, I love to think about the names I will give my children. Just because I’m not pregnant doesn’t mean I can’t pick up a baby name book now and again, does it? Recently, though, I’ve noticed an unsettling trend. Everything I name seems to die.
It started in college when I named my first laptop computer. Do not ask me why I felt compelled to name a thousand dollar piece of technology or why I chose to name it Bob. It did seem somehow to help, though, when it was stolen on one the safest college campuses in the US. When the campus police asked me to describe the computer, it was easy: “Black Gateway, about this big, answers to the name of Bob.” Bob’s replacement, Bob II, turned out to be a lemon. When I bought my first car several years later, I had the foresight not to name it and turned my fascination to plants.
Unfortunately, nurturing plant life is yet another skill I did not inherit from my mother. If her thumb is green, mine is the mushy brown color of dead violets that have been overwatered or the scorched yellow of some leafy plant described by the nursery workers as “hearty” or “low-maintenance.”
I have had some limited success with named plants. When my husband and I were first married, we had two small trees in our house – a cornhusker plant named Clay after an old roommate from Nebraska and a small palm named Ethan after the visiting puppy that knocked it over repeatedly. When we left Virginia for a much smaller apartment, we left them behind, though, and things just haven’t been the same since.
Just recently, after the quick demise of a perfectly lovely purple cyclamen named Chloe, I bought three new plants with my sister who was in town for a visit. After holding a three-way phone conference with my sister and mother from Home Depot for suggestions – “Philodendron, p-h-i” – and reading the little plastic stake in each plant, I took home several new plants – three African violets, the Viola triplets; a succulent named Jade; and one “assorted foliage” with variegated leaves, hence Foley, and hoped for the best. A week later while I was out of town, my husband reported to me that the triplets in particular weren’t doing well.
“They might not make it ‘til you get back,” he said.
“What about Foley and Jade,” I asked like a worried mother.
“I think they’re okay. Do you think they need water?” he asked.
When I commented on this phenomenon to my husband, he said, “But what about Lucy?” referring to our dog.
“Yes,” I said, “I guess Lucy has survived.”
“Not just survived,” he countered. “She’s flourished.” And if you call a four-year-old beagle mix who howls at doorbells on the television, trembles at baths and baby gates, and sleeps under the bed “flourishing,” then I suppose she is.
I’m not suggesting, of course, that these plants are dying because we have named them, but it does seem a compelling reason to leave the birth certificate for our first child blank for just a little while.