Free roses

I am a cheap date (no, that is not the same as easy). Maybe back in the day, I would have been impressed by a guy buying me dinner in an expensive restaurant. But now I have been exposed to way too many eateries – both good and also some that the health dept. should have closed down – for that to turn my head. Same with flowers – nice, but not nice enough to spend tons o' bucks on, if you’re trying to make points with this chickie.

Which explains why my found roses made my Sunday. We did our usual after-church deal – breakfast at Denny’s with two other couples. Drummer parked the Subaru and as we climbed out of the vehicle, he noticed and remarked about what looked to be blooms atop this hedge bordering the parking lot. We have these same hedges at the front of our house, and they will sometimes have small white flowers on their new growth - but these were red. I took a few steps closer and discovered that they were roses - about a dozen long-stemmed red ones. I picked one up and it was predictably limp. Probably had lain (laid?) up been on that hedge since last night sometime. I vowed that if they were still there after we’d eaten and returned to the car, I was going to bring them home and try to revive ‘em. Which they were, and which I did.

In the car, I carried the flowers away from my clothing (thorns, after all), then laid them on the kitchen counter when we got home. Snipped off about 1 – 2“ from each stem, put water in a vase, dumped in some plant food. Turned out there were 18 roses – 12 red and 6 pink, and all so healthy, except for the overnight neglect. Then we left for a coupla hours to run weekends. We returned to 18 beautiful, perky blooms.

Why were these lovely, probably costly roses dumped so unceremoniously, and why at Denny’s? (1) By a guy who was stood up? (maybe he deserved it, if they were found in a Denny’s lot!); or (2) By an intended recipient - flowers offered as an apology, and it was a case of too little, too late, in her opinion – “You can stick these flowers where the sun don’t shine”.

Or build your own story. Here’s mine: Back in my between-marriages, rompin’, stompin’ life, something similar happened to me. Among the girls (a cluster of us divorcees in our early 30’s, who hung out together), Friday night was Girls’ Night. My Boyfriend-at-that-time had been told that. The Girls had a round of bars/clubs that we went to, always ending up back in the Bloomington area, close to where most of us lived. The objective was having fun, not pickin’ up guys. Well, pretty soon he picked up on our pattern, and started showing up at the end-of-night spots. So then I knew The Talk was necessary. I set him down and gave him one of those “maybe we should give this a break” talks. Truth was, he obviously had stronger feelings for me than I was ready to reciprocate. An okay guy, but a little cloying. I did not need to see him on both Friday and Saturday, and I could see that he was not on that same plan. When I finished The Talk, he got big tears in his eyes, but agreed to let things cool off. And the very next day, he sent flowers to my job! I was so pissed that I took them to a bar after work and gave them away by handfuls to anyone who would take them. I think this is where my appreciation of flowers ended. True story, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

By the way, it’s Wednesday and the Free Roses are starting to wilt a bit. But doin’ okay, for the price!