Mother's Day flowers

Mother Day is second Sunday of May. That will be the 12th this year. Today is the 8th. Get with the program already.

This is an advertisement that came 4 minutes ago.

Sounds pretty good. We should buy some even if we're motherless.

There's always somebody's mother. 

Or even if you just like having flowers around for a few days. Tulips don't last very long :-(

This is an advertisement that came 3.5 minutes ago. From Yelp. It says, "5 florists to save on Mother's Day.

They made up the part about saving. None of the websites say anything about flowers being on sale.

It's five florists in my area of Denver.

Now for a personal story derived from life as a flower-buyer. There are several such stories, actually, I'll keep them short.

As children we were trained to buy Mum flowers. 

And to not steal them from the neighbor's garden.

Here is how a child thinks. I can tell you precisely because I was a child and I thought this way. 

All the flowers in the world come from God. They just pop up all over the place because God likes flowers. Therefore, go forth freely and pick all the flowers you wish and give them away for you are doing God's work, merely transferring the production of God.

"Where'd you get these?"

     "From the house next door. They're growing next to the house."

"DON'T DO THAT!" 

     "Why not?"

"Because that's her garden."

      "So?"

"She planted them. She worked very hard to put them there. So that she could see them when they came up. She planned this. She worked very hard for them. These are hers, not mine."

     "Oh." 

"Don't ever do this again." 

     "Fine."

What a bummer. This new restriction really cramps my free-ranging style. The whole time I thought God did this and it turns out to be people who do it. And it doesn't just happen, it requires a lot of specialize work and knowlege. This world is not what I thought that it is.

The more I learn about this planet the harder things get.

We all bought her flowers. Five kids loading up Mum with flowers. She likes red roses. Goes like this:

Red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, red roses, ad infinitum.

You see the pattern right off.

At age thirty-five I bought my mother yellow roses. Just for a change of pace. Just to show a bit of imagination. Just a wee bit.

She looks at me like I'm a space alien and she said, "These should be red."

And she's not an arrogant demanding woman. She is actually rather modest. But she does expect her kids to bring her red roses.

All five of us.

"I brought you yellow roses to be different this time."

     "Well I don't like them."

"Start liking them. Open your mind to accept yellow." 

     "I don't like them. I like red."

"Why?"

     "I just do." 

"Why do you just do?"

     "I don't know. I just do." 

And that's as far as I would ever get. 

Just take your stinkin' roses and do what you do with all the rest. Watch them die of neglect. 

And I realized other women are mums who might appreciate flowers more than my mum. I'm doing this so I can see some appreciation, so then try something new and spread the joy.

My landlord lived on the other side of the duplex. It was a cute house in Baker neighborhood, a one-story duplex with a flat roof and stained glass windows in front that looked like a cowboy house among other larger two-story homes, frame and brick and stone and mixed materials,  built in ornate Queen Anne style, where all the rows of shingling are painted different colors or shades, so the whole place is rather fancy and colorful, except this house was plain so it kind of stuck out by not sticking out. 

He and his wife were both quite old. I convinced them to accept me as tenant. Then it turned out they really liked me a lot. They were very helpful to me in ways that you wouldn't imagine, for example, each day they cut out the crossword from the daily newspaper and placed in my screen door. Until I deteriorated so badly that I couldn't understand the clues far less imagine the intended misdirection, understand the relationship with the title, or understand the theme or come up with a range of possible solutions. 

I gave the tall thin sweet elderly landlady the same flowers that I gave to my mother. The elderly landlady freaked the f out. My mum goes, eh, thanks for the roses. Red. Of course. There is no other possible color.

Mum's flowers withered in the vase within just a few days. I went to their house quite a lot in that period so I saw all her flowers from all her kids die a steady death starting at day 2. 

The blooms and buds at the tips start to bend over. Then over the next few days they darken and shrivel. They're still in water but they're not drawing it up. Within a week they're all dead and dried with leaves and pedals fallen around the base, even though there is still water in the vase. 

And the empty vases go where all the empty vases go, on a shelf that starts at the top of the stairs to the basement. The basement stairs are crowned with a long layered row of glass vases. 

Giving flowers or plants to my mum is consigning them to certain steady death. It's a matter of watching them die slowly.

While the same flowers I gave to the landlady next door thrived brightly and fully for weeks. She stretched out their life in the vase somehow. She kept telling me how beautiful they are. She kept telling me how much she likes them. I got 100X more mileage out of the landlady's flowers in terms of observed appreciation than I did my from my mum. My landlady made giving her flowers a very real joy. While my mum made it an obligation. 

"How did you do that?"

     "Do what?"

"What are you doing to these flowers to make them last so long?"

     "Nothing really. I put an aspirin in their water." 

"Is that all? They give you a packet of powder. Did you use that?" 

     "Yes. The first day. Then the second day when I changed the water I added an aspirin." 

"You changed the water."

     "Yes. I change the water each day. New aspirin each day after I cut them."

"You cut them." 

     "Yes. Their cut heals kind of, so I re-cut them each day so they can take up the water. They get shorter each day"

"You go through a lot of trouble to keep these flowers alive."

     "It's no trouble. I love seeing them around. They really brighten up the place. I love these flowers.  I like touching them. I like caring for them. I really really like these flowers." 

She made giving women flowers fun. She made the whole effort worthwhile. She made it an actual joy. From then on I didn't mind so much giving my unappreciative mother flowers because it meant giving the landlady flowers too. This time of year became very fun.

Then at forty, I still had the apartment but feeling quite ill I was staying at my parent's house. I thought, fuck it, skip the whole Mother's day thing this year I'm just not up to it. Make her a card. She has four other kids to pick up the slack. One after another each sibling called and mum was keeping track. "There's only one more kid to call. Only Jimmy is left." Then James called and she's satisfied. "All my children called me." 

She really was pleased with that. It was important to her. Like a child having their birthday acknowledged, she needed each kid to call. That's what she talked about. That's how she talked about it. That's all that mattered. Not the conversation itself with each of her children, just that they called.

They all sent flowers too. One after another throughout the day a different florist arrived delivering a bouquet of red roses. She set them all out together. They dominated the breakfast table. And I observed her neglect them. I watched them all wither and die. Fairly quickly in fact. The process is a bit depressing. 

That was our household. Those were the expectations. That was the care.

Other non Mother's Day roses.

A black woman at work was secretary to bank examiners set up in an office across the street from the Federal Reserve building. They are an exclusive team. Her job was exclusive. 

She and another black woman and I were best friends. Our relationship was well known throughout the entire bank because we had lunch together every day. The cafeteria is subsidized and it is beautiful as a downtown restaurant. The intention is to keep employees inside the bank. Two beautiful black women and me. Sitting together every day. Talking excitedly and laughing. We did a lot of things together outside the bank. They introduced me to Denver black culture. They showed me the places they went. Theirs is a whole different world. 

Their men and women dress up like you wouldn't believe. Like nothing I've seen in the caucasian world. Their style is uniquely their own. Their activities, their politics, their male-female interactions, their sexual world quite different from the caucasian world. Their sense of class divisions is different from caucasian class divisions. And so is their alcohol and recreational drug consumption. These two women showed me all of that.

The secretary was transferred to my building. The larger original building. This was not a happy transfer for her. She did not care to be part of the general Federal Reserve business. She liked being with the examiners, a different and exclusive class of people in their own minds. All these people had specific educations and training. For the most part they are boring as hell. They live and breath, eat, drink and sleep bank laws and financial numbers. They live lives of spreadsheets. (They have another side to them involving alcohol and cocaine, but we mustn't talk about that.) 

To recall her name I went through the whole alphabet to V. 

Valerie Mays. 

She married (I catered her wedding). Now Baker. Now no longer working.

But then, she was unhappily transferred to a department where I used to work. At that point I serviced all the departments so I traveled around the entire building, both buildings, each day. Even to the sub basement where supplies were stored next to where actual cash was stored on pallets stacked to the ceiling. And the ceiling is quite tall for basement ceilings. My ass set next to hundreds of millions of dollars. <--- joke. Did you see it? But it's true!

Knowing she is unhappy and knowing she's trying to pull off an unperturbed face, I wanted her to know that for one I am very happy to have her close by. I had the florist across the street bring her a bouquet of red roses. A BIG one. I didn't know that she'd have to go down and sign for them. But she did. And those roses really did brighten her whole trial of being disiplaced. 

She had that gigantic spray of roses placed right on her desk, and she did know how to care for them too, so they lasted a very long time. And everyone who passed by them remarked because they stood out like nobody's business. And they made her transfer a very big visual thing. She would not transfer invisibly. BANG! There she is. 

So that was that.

Then later a black man who worked there approached me. Another very snappy dresser. Always ALWAYS ALWAYS overly conscious of his look, his individual style. He is GQ to the max. And he said to me, "Mr. Chip, I must say, thank you."

"For what?"

"Thank you for showing us how to treat women. We saw what you did for Valerie. We'd never have thought of that. We all noticed what you did. You changed us. You showed us. And now we know." 

And I must admit it. That wasn't my idea. That was my mother's training.