Memory of a Day in the Past

NOTES FROM 1955 OR 56?

The day was bright and sunny. At least I think it was. It certainly wasn’t raining. Briskly I set off across town with a little trepidation at my boldness doing its best to keep up with me. My destination was somewhere around 28th Street and 6th Avenue, the exact spot still in fate’s hand. First only trucks and cars and people, but soon more promising signs. Pails set on the sidewalk with branches of denuded pussy willows, unopened forsythias and bunches of blueberry leaves. Inside in long flat rooms, amid scatterings of crumpled papers and green snippets from flower stems were boxes layered with flowers like carpets of pine and red and the bright sun of daffodils. Men stood at long flat tables, or stood in corners talking, or just stood looking out of the window that I was looking into. They smiled and said come on in and look around. The roses are all in the back. So I went in and stood among bunches of heather, of hard red tongues  (I can’t remember their names now), red and purple anemones and drooping white freesias a little too suggestive in their heavy languor. But even they had no fragrance. As if the acts of business, of thinking of the blossoms in terms of dollars and pennies had taken away the spirit.

It was ten o’clock in the morning and already the main business of the day was finished. They were very polite, these people who worked with spring all their lives. Twenty two years one of them had been in the business. He’d studied to be an automobile mechanic but there had been no call for his trade when he got out of school. 1932 that had been. And the tall straw-haired man who seemed busier than the others, seemed to be a sort of supervisor – he was pointed out to me as being a college man. Somewhere in the back someone was trying to find out if the short earth-colored Italian wanted the flowers in boxes or bundles, which seemed rather difficult since he spoke no English and they knew no Italian. They told me of their work. It started at 5:30 and closed at two o’clock. Someone pinned a camellia on my coat. Come back when you want another one, they said. The phone rang. Someone came in to buy a few more flowers, and I decided it was time for me to go to work.