Lost in transit

Flowers

When I used to take the train to work, I regularly bought flowers from a nice old lady at the flower shop at the train station in Vienna. Once a week, usually Fridays, I would chat with her briefly as I selected fresias or roses or irises or tulips or whatever else looked good. Then, five or six years ago I finally got tired of getting bronchitis every winter from waiting in the cold for my train and started driving to work. I missed taking the train, though, because I hate to drive, and I especially missed buying the flowers from that old lady.

Yesterday I got to ride the train again and on my way home, although I was in a hurry to catch the train, I stopped by the shop for some flowers. Since it has been several years, I figured she would no longer be there, having retired or whatever else old ladies do. But as I walked up to her shop she came out to meet me.

"I saw you walking through the crowd and couldn't believe my eyes," she said. "But it looked like you. I had to come out and see if it was you or someone else, your brother maybe," she said.

"I've been driving to work," I said. "I missed your flowers."

"Your hair has gone white," she said. "I almost didn't recognize you."

"That happened when George W. Bush became president," it occurred to me to say, later on, when I was sitting in the train with six red roses for my wife and twelve yellow-orange roses for my girls. Instead, at the time, I said something like, "yeah, well, it happens."

I told her I hoped it wouldn't be so long until I saw her the next time, except I was in a huge hurry to get out of there and so was a little flustered, and the grammar of that sentence in German kept slipping away from me until she finally figured out what I was trying to say and completed my sentence for me. She concurred.

The day was postcard perfect. Blue sky with clouds like giant white fluffy cow pies in clear joyous autumn sunshine; poplars and all the other trees lining the way out of Vienna along the Danube were bright green in the light.

It was very nice. The conductor on the train was friendly. It made me happy to be living in Central Europe, where I can love ladies selling flowers -- nothing creepy of course -- and they can love me.

But then I remembered the Vietnamese women with the flower stand at the Pike Place Market in Seattle years ago; their righteous penstemon took my breath away too. I suppose I would have eventually established a similar relationship with them. I suppose it's not where you live, it's how you do.

Posted by Mig at September 4, 2003 09:35 AM