Aki Matsura Drama

The bonsai club's sensei sent out another impassioned plea about Aki Matsura, which is coming up on Sept. 26.  I'll be attending Callahan Moot's wedding on the 24th in Santa Fe, so I'm sort of writing myself out of the action.  I may be able to help out on the actual day of the event.  Here's the text of the e-mail...

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 Aahh, Folks

       First let me say that the vast majority of you will have no idea what I'm talking about, and the majority of THAT majority won't give a damn anyway. You are both lucky and smart. I would not even bother you with this teapot tempest, except that you will hear about it soon enough, and it might as well be from me. It appears that the Club's participation in the Aki Matsuri-- normally a wonderfully fun event-- has gone sour for us and for me. The entire idea to have Mark stringently review trees has turned into a sad welter of hurt feelings and angry egos. When it was first suggested, I knew it would be risky, but I thought maybe we might see an opportunity to put a sharper edge on our trees, and to have more show quality plants as a result of this method. Unfortunately, some of us were not prepared for this "tough love" approach, and now we have a small handful of pissed-off members, and a resignation or two from the Club.

        Occasionally, when I screwed something up, my teacher Khan Komai would say to me "Maybe I expected too much from you", and I would die inside..... yet here I am again. It really calls into question my ability to teach bonsai--- it doesn't seem that I have been able to impart either the spirit or techniques of this art sufficiently to avoid this foolishness. And though none of this puts me in an apologetic mood, I must apologize sincerely to Ken Stegemiller, who gave me stern advice against this idea from the first day, with a pointed observation "This can kill the club". I'm sorry, Ken--- you were pretty much on the money. No one was up to this challenge, and now I am accompanied by a chorus of "I told you so's" from those who were smarter than I.

        Now, a number of you will consider this to be Drama Queen stuff, and you're probably right. It reminds me, for all the world, of when I volunteered at Senior Centers and some poor old yo-yo would stand accused of stealing a piece or two of the 20,000--piece jigsaw puzzle, and the whole place would go up for grabs. But you also know that the Club means a lot to me, and I used to look forward to Aki with a crazed paranoid fondness. Selah.

        I guess it all needs to be put into more capable hands  now. What do you all want to do??  We'll need new personnel for tree wrangling and a new approach, and right now I'm pretty discouraged around the whole scene. I'll help any way I can, but maybe I'm getting too old for this crap......