While I was going through my papers looking for query letters I'd sent I found this:
The cigar
smoking owner of the florist shop convinced me. "I've got them in
the case. I'll give you a good deal." That was how I ended up
with a dozen long stem roses, far more flamboyant than the usual wild
flowers or irises that sometimes grace my apartment.
These red roses on my dining room table carry a weight. There’s something deathlike about them, in
all that velvet darkness. I visualize
them directly entering my heart like so many thorny arrows. Oddly enough,
over the years I never received roses from any of the males I’d been involved
with. It could have been the era I came
to age in, the late 70’s and early 80’s with feminism playing a role in what I
considered acceptable or not.
Then, in the twenty plus years I lived in Barcelona, on the day
of San Jordi (Saint George, the patron saint of the region) I received a single
red rose with a single sheaf of wheat, the traditional gift for a woman
with its symbols of blood and fertility. The man received a book which
always struck me as the better deal. But carrying
the rose as I walked home from work, I felt loved no matter if I got if
from my partner or the owner of a restaurant, or even at my gym where one of
the trainers handed them out. I
collected them in a vase and watched them droop down and dry up, but they never
had quite the presence of the ones on my table now.
There were other less rosy moments in my Barcelona flat where I
sat in the wreckage of an 18 year relationship, a wounded elephant it was resistant
to the end. Tired of listening to my
woes, my sister asked what I needed to come back home and I answered, though I
was no longer sure where home might be, two things, a computer and a cell
phone, and promptly forgot the conversation.
Miraculously, they were waiting for me as I made my way through European
airports crowded and chaotic with threats of shoe bombers and finally arrived to
Atlanta.
In the suburbs I was inhabiting a modern day Angor Wat, an
abandoned landscape full of structure but no people around. After the crowds and activity of Barcelona
streets, I was shipwrecked, uncertain how to maneuver this new landscape,
unlike any I’d ever known. The suburb
was new territory. I grew up on a farm
and after I left at 17, I spent most of my life in big cities. With the help of my sister I ventured out of
the house, learning how to get to Target and the drugstore and later, the bus
to the train to the downtown that shimmered in new buildings but held little
that was desirable to me after the history of Europe or the architectural
treasures of New York or Chicago.
I moved back north to rework the patterns of my life, facing the
ghosts of my family and my immigrant past.
And I found a peacefulness in Buffalo where I teach refugees in a
program that once helped my parents in the 50’s after their escape from Latvia
after the war. In my own way I found a
different kind of love than the all too familiar twosome of a couple.
Love became the gift of a strawberry wrapped in tinfoil from a
Burmese student in the middle of an interminable winter. I simply stare at the simplicity and wonder
of such a gift.
Love is the birthday party a friend throws for me, preparing a
table for gifts as if it were the wedding or bridal shower I never had. The same weekend after the party, a dinner
out, and tickets to Cirque du Soleil, I confess to my friend, “Maybe it’s too
much to celebrate like this.” She
answers that in your 50’s you never know what will happen or who will be
missing next year.
Love is cranking up Sylvester’s “You make me feel” to dance to
by myself.
