Most topiary depicts animals: dogs, cats, dolphins in mid leap, horses, deer, hulking grizzly bears savagely gutting each other in ferocious territorial disputes, bunnies, wildebeests, copulating penguins, and the like. Here at the Koontz manor, we encourage creativity among the gardening staff, as among all our exceptional and adored employees. As a result, we boast the world’s only collection of topiary that takes for its subject flora instead of fauna. Here, an immensely tall length of boxwood hedge is carved into a series of pine trees. And here, the dense foliage of a line of dwarf yew trees has been trimmed to resemble a boxwood hedge. Oh, and look here: A great mass of oleander has been meticulously shaped into what appears to be a moss-hung magnolia. And over there: A potentially massive California live oak was stunted and deformed with chemicals, brutally trimmed, pinched at the roots, and ruthlessly compressed until it now appears to be a four-foot-tall, gnarled, eccentrically shaped bonsai evergreen. And how about that giant tulip formed from a thoroughly terrorized phoenix palm?
This essay is not about topiary, however. Neither is it about flossing, although now that you’ve insisted upon knowing why I took such a long floss break, I must finish the account of my journey through topiary to the old carriage master’s house at the far end of the estate.
By the way, please understand that I do not mean to imply that the carriage master himself is old. He is, indeed, a strapping young fellow who, if only he produced leaves, could easily be trimmed and trained to resemble a sturdy oak. He is remarkably handsome, as well, and would surely be a film star of the magnitude of Tom Cruise were it not for the perpetually bloodshot third eye that sits slightly off-center in his too prominent forehead.
For the longest time, Skippy – the carriage master – had so little to do here on the Koontz estate that he turned in quiet desperation to a correspondence course in boredom management, offered by Harvard University. We have no horse-drawn carriages, you see. Furthermore, we keep our automobiles, SUVs, trucks, motorcycles, tanks, missile transports, ice cream wagons, and bulldozers in more modern garages closer to the main house.
Skippy’s duties became markedly more complex and fulfilling upon the establishment of the floss-collection project. In excess of two hundred dedicated individuals are employed and housed on the estate, as well as a variety of less dedicated but much appreciated and much cuddlier animals of many kinds. Our Mrs. Scuttlesby requires that every last one of them – including me and my incomparable wife – floss after breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as you might expect, but also after every snack and even after consuming something as apparently inconsequential to dental health as a diet cola or a glass of water. When I say “every last one of them,” I mean toinclude the animals. Mrs. Scuttlesby is a demon about oral hygiene regardless of species. On a difficult day in the Great Vault of Unimaginable Torment, when the genetically engineered two-hundred-pound pit bulls are called upon too frequently to protect The Book of Counted Sorrows from would-be thieves and deranged poetry haters, these dogs alone can use hundreds of feet of unwaxed and waxed floss to remove stubborn shreds of visitors’ flesh from between their teeth. By the explicit and vigorously enforced order of Mrs. Scuttlesby, all used floss must be conveyed to the carriage master immediately upon completion of the flossing procedure, which is most vividly, not to say painstakingly, described – with diagrams, charts, graphs, and satellite photos -on pages 376 through 394 of the official estate manual. (An accompanying videotape demonstration of the required procedure, with compulsory flossing techniques, stirringly narrated by James Earl Jones, can be obtained from the estate librarian.)
Upon receipt of each length of used floss, Skippy measures it with a laser micrometer, photographs it against a black velvet cloth, fills out an official floss receipt (pink copy to the user of the floss, yellow copy to Mrs. Scuttlesby, white copy directly to the nuclear-proof archives deep under the carriage master’s cottage), and only then ties the latest contribution to the correct ball of accumulated floss.