An Afternoon with a Flower

"i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it"
e.e.cummings

Two Fridays ago I carried a flower the entire afternoon. I carried it first in my hair, then in my hand, and finally in Martin's pocket. It was a guest, a friend, a companion, a silent witness -- and it was dying.

What happened was that Central Park was simply breathing with full lungs after a torrential April shower, and all the mauve and pink and purple colours were sharpened and refreshed, and we were walking across it, on our way to the Museum of Natural History. In one little nook, next to a lake, a few workmen were doing some construction work. One was driving a small bob-cat-type of vehicle, and while talking and yelling out to the others, he rammed the top part of the car into the lower branches of a tree, hovering in a cloud of baby-white-and-pink blossoms. They spilled like a waterfall, and covered the men, the car, and the ground, the branch swaying helplessly over it. Trying to manoeuvre away from the tree, the driver hit it once again, provoking another pink snowfall, which earned him some serious teasing from his colleagues. As we passed by them, we were stepping on the lovely flowers, and I picked up one small bunch, that had flowered from the same bud, and stuck together. I wasn't sure what to do with it -- it was still so fresh, and wet from the rain, and perfect; it seemed unaware that very soon it will begin to wilt, and shrivel, and crumble. At that moment we reached Central Park West, and the Museum loomed up, towering over us and the flower. And so it somehow became quite clear what needed to be done. We stuffed all our belongings into the backpack, Martin hooked the flower into my hairclip, and off we went.

We admired the wild animals of all the zones, strolled respectfully among the herd of dinosaurs reduced to rib-cages (it was like watching a mighty opponent who lost in a combat), studied carefully the simulation of the mountain-making processes, and tried to resist touching the sparkling, veined slabs of all kinds of rocks -- but most importantly, we went to the Big Bang theatre. Here, you really get to see it all, and from the beginning (the beginning of our beginning, in any case). The flower was now visibly wilting and getting loose in the hairclip, so I took it into my hand, and we walked together down the spiral line of many billion years, reading about the explosions, the gases, the gravity, the quasars, the stars, the planets, the meteorites (pieces of which we looked at through glass), and towards the end of the line, the earth, this earth we were walking on, after a succession of species and creatures filed through it one after the other, our earth. At the hairwidth of space at the end of the line, we were looking at ourselves, like in a mirror, the offspring of all that spacedust.

The flower was in a bad shape. It was getting sticky and warm, so I deposited it into Martin's jacket pocket. Late that night, we left what remained of it on the terrace of the 47th floor of our building, overlooking Manhattan, and just catching a glimpse on the right of the green tufts of the Park. And I felt like Faulkner's Benji bellowing over a broken flower; and I wished I had a Luster to fix it half-angrily with a splint...