Apr

22

Speaking of neighborhood businesses I note for some years: I have a theory about the profusion of flower stalls and ranks upon ranks of fresh blooms on practically every block in the Big Apple. Since I never buy for myself, and it is usually rare for men (other than the homoerotic) to buy flowers for their singular singleton apartments, who exactly buys these daily refreshed buckets of beauty?

My theory is that so many people are workaholics, that nearly all relationships, married or [merely] cohabitative, are on the slender lip of breakaway, fall-away or breakdown. The men in such relationships, and occasionally the women, returning home late from labors in the mines and pits, feel beholden to their opposite numbers for not making a fuss. They buy apologetics on the quick: transmuted, translated and hybridized floral tributes. What partner and love can resist a dense evidence, a spray of beauty unexpectedly gracing the front entry or the nook near the vestibule?

Thus, when I see men of a midnight toting the cone-shaped waxy paper-engirded crimson-riot blooms in pink champagne and magenta, jonquil and plum, I mentally take a post-it: Here is a man who loves his dame, a man who has failed to arrive home in time for the supper that lies, neglectedly, warmed and re-heated, who semaphores to his beloved that it is no fault of lack of love, only lack of time. Hurrying through the darkened night, he cradles and ferries to his beloved the simplified language hues of laconic but no-less heartfelt love.

His labors on the Board and the Exchange are worthy, but they do not, in the end, quite surround us with the embrasure of affection and approbation we crave. But the loved one's silent and vibrant support and affection despite the lateness of the hour upon hour lends strength, courage and heart to leave again the comfort temples and re-achieve, anew, the dawning day's tests and trials, from near shores and far.

Thus the flowers that hectically and gloriously tier our blocks of Manhattan and environs.

And another day is done.


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