03/17/03’s illustrious band:

The Smile Tree

Brought to you by Skeeter, who has officially buzzed off to his new job and home in the near south.

Skeeter is a plant guy, so his office here at Media HQ was full of plants while he occupied it. Some people referred to it as the Jungle. The visible proliferation of leaves over the tops of the cube walls served as a handy landmark: Take a left at the Jungle and go two more doors down.

The workplace green didn’t make the trek to Skeeter’s new digs; instead, several of his colleagues, including me, have adopted his plants. Now we’ll always have an excuse to keep in touch so we can ask the expert how to keep the poor things alive. My neighbor across the aisle, for instance, inherited a spider plant -- no small undertaking for a man who believes that unabridged dictionaries were invented specifically for dropping on eight-legged scuttlers.

One of the adoptees now living with me is a small umbrella tree. Whenever I hear “umbrella,” I think of “Let a smile be your umbrella.” So I’ve dubbed the new tree a smile tree, and it will always remind me happily of the friend who have it to me.

Here’s to spring, new starts, and new growth.

E-mail the Media Sensation: jugglernaut@hotmail.com