Roses

Image credit: Photo by freg on Flickr

I was driving to the grocery store today with the kids (mercifully and mysteriously) quiet in the back seat. My head was spinning with all those thoughts I want to dump in a Pensieve when I drove past a yard bordered by huge rose bushes.

Why, I wondered, are roses such highly regarded flowers? The smell nice enough, but the bushes aren't particularly pretty. Is it because of the thorns? Because the beauty and the scent plus the thorns makes for such a lovely metaphor? Do we love the flower itself or the metaphor? And is it that pretty? The flowers I saw were in full bloom, and I was past them by now, so I pictured a rosebud.

I was seventeen and I was walking through a hospital lobby. I wanted to bring him flowers. No, not flowers. I wanted the red rosebuds and baby's breath in the tall, thin glass vase that stood out vibrant, a blood red kiss, against the black background of the the refrigerated cabinet. Really, I wanted him to give me roses. ("A single red rose would do nicely." I remember writing that somewhere. In my journal. In the margin of a notebook. On a napkin.) But I couldn't let him know that. Giving roses would be like taking my clothes off in front of him.

So, I picked out this nice little arrangement of orange and yellow flowers -- flowers whose names I didn't know -- while I smiled to myself about the roses in the glass case. It seemed like this delicious private joke just to think about wanting to buy them. My father had driven me there and was standing behind me. I didn't want him to know either.

I took the elevator up myself and wandered past his room; his bed and the curtains were arranged such that I couldn't see him, but he could see me. He had another friend visiting -- Rich, someone I didn't know -- and he sent Rich running down the hospital corridor after me. I was terrified and embarrassed and feeling stupid: the way I get when I'm in unfamiliar territory with unfamiliar people. And the way I get when I'm close to him.

He was sitting up pale in the bed in a white hospital gown with blue diamonds. His friend Rich sat in a chair at the foot of the bed. I put the flowers awkwardly down on the table next to his bed, said something about them being a stupid obligatory gesture, and then sat in a chair at his right hand. I could see his chest and the soft hair of his underarm up the wide sleeve of the gown. I listened to him talk to Rich. What did I have to say? I was there. Rich left eventually, and there we were alone, for what seemed like not quite enough time to draw a single breath. Then my dad walked past the room. "Hey, there goes your dad. You should grab him." I tried to linger. I had to leave. Standing at the door with my dad, saying goodbye, I looked at the cheerful flowers sitting on the bedside table and thought about roses and smiled.

My husband used to give me roses for no reason but that it made me happy. That single red rose I yearned for in the romantic fantasy of my youth dissolved into real gardens' worth in the romantic fantasy that was my young adulthood. Sometimes Mark would bring them himself and sometimes he'd send them; I'd open the door to a delivery person with a vase overflowing with those blood red rosebuds I'd been too afraid to touch as a teen. But I found I wasn't the only one who got roses. From a stripper to a neighbor to a teenager selling jewelry on the street: roses were currency to buy fantasy or sex or silence.

Now I drive past them, bush upon bush in full bloom, and wonder what I saw in them.

Roses. You see. They're nothing special.