There was a time when I was posting pictures of flowers on Facebook. A lot of them, and probably enough to annoy some people. Oh, and you can strike “probably.”
“What’s with all the flowers?” people would ask.
I would type out something that probably tried too hard to articulate the impermanence of everything. But, really, I was intuitively trying to ward off the forever encroaching darkness. The temporary beauty of flowers do that for me.
I snapped this little beauty that was peeking above a fence in an alley that begins across the street from where I live and ends downtown, next to a once-beloved Mexican restaurant that was ruined by new ownership. Things change. Flowers wither and die. Treasured dining spots, where you would meet old friends who were in town to visit family and who craved the same hot and spicy flavor profile that you did, turn into something that maybe other people like, but you and your friends tried once or twice and found the joint to be that never-again kind of unpalatable. Businesses get sold or acquired, and not everybody gets to stick around (and here I will consciously choose to place a full stop).
My relationship with flowers started as a kid at our place on Oxford Way in Stockton, which was stumbling distance from Dan Mellis Liquors, where my dad bought his hooch. I remember sitting in the backyard for what seemed like hours, staring at superhighways of aphids who were climbing up and down the flower stems. For toddler me, it was a formative psychedelic experience.
After that, flowers drifted off my radar for a while. I remember hearing a funny story from a high-school friend about another guy’s mom getting a terrifying ride home from work with her coworker’s son, a guy we all knew from the school parking lot who called himself the Wrench. After he repeatedly stomped on the accelerator of his hemi-powered Dodge, the increasingly rattled mother glanced out the window at a stoplight and nervously commented, “My, my, look at the pretty flowers.” “Flowers?!? Fuck that,” the Wrench snarled. “I hate flowers. Weeds is my favorite flower.”
In my later adolescence, I was spending an inordinate amount of time in my room, bonging out with headphones on to the usual rock classics, along with plenty of prog and jazz and other weirdness. I remember really grooving to “Dead Flowers” by the Rolling Stones, unaware of Townes Van Zandt’s cover, which I also love but that’s beside the point of where I’m going here.
Anyway, my mom was getting tired of my perpetual state of wake’n’bake and listening to tunes all day, so she hooked me up with a job as a delivery boy at a flower shop owned by a friend of a friend. It was a block from the town’s big Catholic cemetery and a short hop away from mortuary row, which should have given clueless stoner-teen me an idea of the destination of most of the deliveries. It was a mom’n’pop shop, with mom continually visiting the walk-in refrigerator for another beer and pop non-stop spouting hard-boiled Horatio Alger-esque advice regarding hard work and bootstrap pulling and you young punks need to listen better. All that, and you probably know that particular success motivation tape if you’ve been around for a while. Oh, and there was the boss’s daughter, who was an entertaining gossip, and her husband, a garbage man affiliated with the esteemed Stockton Scavengers organization who was fresh off the boat from someplace in Italy and was every bit the cliché of that central point of a tri-circle Venn diagram where street corner thug, testicle-grabbing gorilla, and complete buffoon meet. He would hang around the shop once the day’s garbage was collected, and who doesn’t love getting called a “pussy” and a “homo” and worse while you’re trying to load floral sprays and a casket blanket – and let’s not forget the corsage, to be pinned on the chest of the beautifully embalmed and made-up lady in that pretty white Batesville casket – for your next trip down California Street to a funeral home?
Shoot, I’m really getting off base here. My point is that, despite some not so wonderful experiences involving flowers, and I do have at least one good story dating back to my floral delivery days that I may revisit here sometime, I only wanted to point out how flowers continue to be a source of temporary beauty for me. So maybe I’ll go listen to some Graham Parker, or I’ll dig out that copy of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire that a good friend gave to me a long time ago.
Until then, happy trails.