A ROSE IS A ROSE IS NOT A ROSE

By Tom Fillion

It was one of those holidays. Valentine’s Day. One of those holidays that requires flowers. And I always forget. Maybe. It's just another speed bump in the calendar of life that comes up on you when you're not paying attention—even though there’re signs in Kool-Aid green and stripes as white as a skunk in moonlight and headlights covering the road telling you there's a fucking speed bump coming. Or a holiday. It's right in front of you smoldering like a volcano, a zit in the porcelain landscape of your life. The pus is going to hit the fan if you don't buy her something.

It's not a gift certificate or a lottery ticket holiday either. Nope. But one of those made-up holidays not tied to a solstice or an equinox, the birth or death of a savior or a vegetable god. Nope. Not like Christmas with Santa, ipso fatso, in a red suit crashing through a window or slithering like a Jenny Craig retread down a chimney to deliver U-Hauls full of gifts—with receipts, please-ready for the return line at Walmart. Or Easter, now there's a real holiday. It's got rabbits, chocolate morphed into a barnyard of creatures, jelly beans, and colored eggs. Or the Fourth of July where it is better to give than receive cherry bombs and the rockets' red glare bouncing off roof shingles compliments of the neighborhood drunks.

Those are all first string, first team, top-shelf holidays. Anything with flowers? Well, sorry. That’s second string, meat squad.

Flowers? You wanted flowers. You didn't come right out and say it, but I knew. Call it the Braille of marriage, the sign language, the language of the deaf and dumb of ‘gentle on your mind’ marriage. There were flowers in your future and empty vases mysteriously appearing throughout the house like undercover cops on a stakeout. I was the target. I was the accused. The signs were all there.

You of the anti-bacterial thumb. You who called the front yard, the garden. The garden? I always laughed when you called it the garden, too. It's not a garden, I protested. Our front yard? It shattered my whole concept of a garden. Our front yard? I've, in fact, deleted the word from my vocabulary. Completely. I know the word is hardwired in my brain somewhere, but I've heard if you don't use it, you lose it. That's what I'm hoping for. This is my concept of a garden before I stopped using the word. Before you kind of ruined it for me. It's laid out like a Webster's dictionary. A garden has rows and rows of vegetables lined up like British Revolutionary era soldiers with bright, colorful peppers and tomatoes sprouting from bayonets impaled in the ground. That's a garden!

Our front yard is not a garden because you cannot eat the St. Augustine grass I planted several years ago. Only the chinch bugs and mole crickets can do that. Very efficiently too. They've turned it to moon rock where only non-native weeds can grow. Tasty weeds, nevertheless. Like the appetizers listed on the first page, left column of all our favorite restaurants. Fancy stuff like, eggplant foo-foo. Tasty weeds that Crazy Eddie, our dog with bad teeth, an on-again, off-again vegan, uses as an herbal healing remedy to cleanse his pallet of horse hoof and pig snout. Where does he do it? All over the brand-new carpeting that we buy every few years because Crazy Eddie thinks the carpeting is the "garden," I guess. I have no other explanation for it. The carpeting is a mosaic, a tapestry of upchuck and modern, abstract art from the "garden" by Crazy Eddie.

          You wanted flowers though, and I was your faithful worker bee, the green knight of your "garden." Not of silk or of sweet, Confederate fragrances like jasmine that reminded me that Cotton was once King. Nor did you want tulips from Amsterdam, the place full of opium and wooden shoes a size too small for dancing and fingers stuck in dikes. Nor did you want African violets like your mother who could never kill them, no matter what she did or didn't do for them, or how long she neglected them except at the end on her deathbed with only Medicaid and you at her side, but mostly you because you are a good daughter.

          Roses? Yellow Roses? That's what you wanted. That's the speed bump I was trying to avoid, trying to jump over, or find a detour around. I looked at my watch on Valentine’s Day like the condemned man waiting for an extension on an appeal from the Supreme Court. Nope. Not this time. Three o'clock in the afternoon already. I've made a major mistake and bought a ticket on a train wreck and I'm in the front seat, first car. If I don't deliver on the flowers, the yellow roses, your favorites, I can prepare my own last meal from Swanson's meatloaf supreme or Campbell's soup of the day.  Unfortunately, I don't think the corner beef jerky and Zippo lighter convenience store carries yellow roses. It does carry a fantastic assortment of T-shirts and license plates celebrating life as a bass or a snook, not to mention the bags of chips that were once ears of corn or buried potatoes in a previous life. 

          You wanted roses. Not white or red, but yellow. Very specific. I liked that. I didn't even need a list like I do when I go to the grocery store to buy two or three items. Or a cell phone just in case I need to make an emergency call from the dairy aisle or that time I was in the wine section without a clue about wines that sounded like bordellos and brothels. Yellow, I suppose like the sunlight even though it is probably white or red when it leaves the surface of the sun and turns yellow from motion sickness by the time it reaches us here on earth. I do that too on our trips, the motion sickness, but only when I'm not driving, sitting in the passenger seat and you're driving with both hands on the steering wheel.

Yellow roses. Okay.

          So, I drove with our daughter, Anna, who was born twelve (flowerless? I can't remember) holidays ago, give or take a teacher conference or two. She was my consultant, my advisor in this endeavor, unbeknownst to her. I was afraid to go alone to one of those stores full of outdoor chimes that would make good target practice for the shotgun I inherited from my Uncle Billy who passed away last year. Anna was the advance party, the scout, the one to be approached by one of those dainty ladies who owned the place because she had too much money from interior decorating—but mostly from a rich husband, or ex-husbands, who played golf way too much with Ping or Callaway golf clubs. Of course, I told Anna going with me was good practice for the SAT and the Ivy League.

          Roses? Yellow roses?

          I looked at my daughter when the lady who smelled like the deodorant I hang from the rearview mirror of my truck informed me that all the roses in the city have already been sold, in fact, Venezuela is completely out, defoliated of everything except poor people and oil. She did have a few red roses, but for fifty dollars each that added up to a new golf club for her husband who was off the hook and out playing golf on this holiday.

"And by the way, why so much for a rose?" I asked. “Was it descended from the ancient Sumerian stock, bred like an Arabian racehorse to withstand the withering sunlight if mulched properly and not overwatered? Or, Mrs. South Beach Time-Share, can you trace the lineage of your spare red roses to the roses of Malmaison where Josephine grew them taller than her husband, Napolean, who gave up flowers for continents and the Holy Roman Empire? Or do they come from the Peace roses smuggled out of France during World War II by the likes of Hogans' Heroes when they went into syndication?”

"No," she answered.   

          Out of roses? Yellow roses?

I looked at my daughter.

          "None of the above," I said, my face covered with the look: everything is practice for the SAT.

How can an entire city and half a continent no longer a rainforest be out of yellow roses?

Mrs. South Beach Time-Share pointed to the wall.

"No, I don't want a clock, I need roses, yellow roses. Minimum of a dozen, long-stemmed, or it's TV dinners and Spam for special occasions."

She kept pointing at the clock like one of those statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary with her arms outstretched.

She kept pointing at the clock, her arms flapping like a seabird tied up in fishing line.

          "Closing? You can't close. I need roses, yellow roses or I'm mulch."

          She was unmoved. My procrastination, in fact, delighted her. It proved some subtle point.

          "Planning? Do you have a sign that says it's illegal, immoral, or indecent to buy yellow roses on this artificially sweetened holiday after four o'clock? Where are your house rules? 911? Trespassing?"

My daughter pulled me towards the door without a rose or a raincheck. Mrs. South Beach Time-Share, before quickly deadbolting the door, did take mercy on my soul and gave us directions to another establishment, a nursery, that possibly had long-stemmed roses.

"I'm there," I said through the bullet proof glass that she Windexed from inside.

          We arrived at the nursery fifteen minutes later. There were roses everywhere! More than Venezuela!  There were floribundas, hybrid teas, grandifloras, climbers, and miniatures and an old man that introduced them by name like his grandchildren: Day Breaker, Livin' Easy, Honey Perfume, Betty Boop, Memorial Day, Elle, Love n' Peace, Gemini, About Face, Glowing Peace, Crimson Bouquet, Candelabra. He rattled off the names in blinding speed like an auctioneer.

          "Chill," I said.

"Don't have those," he replied.

"No, I mean, I don't need the lineup for the World Series of Roses. I need twelve, long-stemmed, yellow roses for this man-made holiday that is almost over."

My daughter nodded in agreement.

The old man surveyed his rose garden and located some splashes of yellow amongst the red, white and lavender.

"One potato, two potato, three potato, four. There are four blossoms on this one," he pointed. "Six on this one. Two over here. That's twelve in my book. All yellow."

I stuck my nose in each blossom like they were upside down wedding dresses. What a magnificent smell! Romance incarnate!

"Sold," I said, "but what about the sheer, fancy paper instead of these black, plastic buckets and all the other crap in the bucket?"

"You'll need that," he said, "when you plant them in about six hours of sunlight a day and not too much water or it'll kill them. And make sure the roots are not wound up tight like the guts of a baseball or a golf ball. The roots have to make good contact with the soil, or it's lights out for the roses."

"Plant them, huh?"

I looked at my daughter. This was getting complicated like the SAT.

"Yeah, okay, ring us up. This man-made holiday is almost over, and it's the thought that counts anyway, right?"

The old man agreed and we drove away with three buckets of roses, all yellow.

You cried when you saw the roses.

"Too much water will kill them," I said watching the tears fall on the roses, "and they need about six hours of sunlight every day and soil that has leftovers from the Crazy Buffet and is fat with wood chips, compost, pine needles, cow manure, and fertilizer."

Still you cried.

"Save it for the planting," I said. "Your roses need some water when we put them in the soil."

I went to the aluminum shed that I inherited from my father who set it up like an irregular trapezoid, tall enough for shovels that leaned at less than sixty degrees.

I was on the third hole, not on the golf course with Callaway golf clubs, but the third hole of your roses with the shovel, each hole a cylinder of eighteen inches in diameter by eighteen inches deep when you said, "THEY AREN'T ROSES."

"If you keep crying they won't be roses, too much water, remember?" I said to no avail. "They look like roses, they smell like roses."

"They aren't roses," you repeated.

"Well, if they aren't roses, a dozen long-stemmed, yellow roses like you wanted, what are they?" I asked rubbing my eyes like Aladdin's lamps trying to see what they really were, but when I finished rubbing the same roses were still there.

"What are they?" you asked, repeating my question.

I knew I was in trouble then—when you repeated my question. It was like my mother calling me by my full confirmation name.

"Those roses are another responsibility," you said, "like washing dishes, making beds, fixing dinner, cleaning up the cats' hairballs and Crazy Eddie's upchucks. That's what they are."

"But, but, you wanted twelve, long-stemmed yellow roses for a Chinese vase from the Ming dynasty full of water that don't grow and don't need to be watered or fertilized? That's what you wanted, right?" I asked.

You nodded from the Niagara Falls of your tears.

"If I gave you a fish you would eat for a day, but if I taught you to fish you would eat for a lifetime," I said, "but if I gave you roses, you would have them for a few days, but if I gave you rose bushes you would have roses for a lifetime."

"That smells like dead fish," you said. "I wanted roses to look at, admire, and remember when we first met," you said. "The trips to New York through Washington Square with pigeons and skateboarders to Vermont's covered bridges and streams full of polished stones, not a dead fish in a black bucket to be buried in the garden."

"Garden? It's not a garden," I said. "This is the front yard where I dug these holes."

"And those are not roses," you said.

"And how about if I plant these roses that are roses that are not roses in this garden that's a garden that's not a garden?" and your tears stopped and the flowers in your blue eyes sparkled open.