Flora

Flora means many things to me. It was the name of one of my mother's best friends when I was a young teen in London.
Flora, like my mother, was a Scot and still spoke with her lilting burr. She lived in what we called a bed-sit, short for bed-sitting room. She shared a bathroom with others in the building, and had a small kitchen corner for simple cooking. She worked for an airline as a ticketing clerk and I thought her very glamorous. She was the first woman I knew who was glamorous and attractive though not in any way beautiful. In fact her skin had large pores and she nearly always had a pimple or two, one coming in and one fading. Her eyes popped a bit, she had an underbite and her nose was what is called aristocratic, in polite company, but we just called it big. Flora's hands were ivory smooth, white, long fingers and painted nails which were never chipped. Her hair, worn shoulder length in the style of Bette Davis was auburn and always shiny. She smelled of cigarettes, garlic and perfume and I loved it. Her voice was sweet and girlish and she sang soprano for amateur operatic productions. We went to see her in one where she played the ingenue and her leading man had halitosis, a trial for her, as one would imagine.

What I loved about visits with Flora were the conversations she had with my mother about her boyfriends. It was the only time I wasn't bored and wanting to be away from my mother and off doing my own teen thing. This was my introduction to Chick Chat, that exclusive female form of bonding, where we Get Down To It. I was being the fly on the wall but I was the fly like a sponge. I absorbed so much juicy stuff it's a miracle I didn't just plop off that wall and make a nasty stain on Flora's threadbare carpet.

She was the friend who ran behind my mother imploring her to calm down when I informed my mother I wanted to become Jewish. My mother, to give her her due (groan) had tried hard to be open about religion, and as a knuckle-rapped exCatholic turned Communist had decided against raising my sister and me with any religion. She told us to choose whatever we liked. And I chose Jewish. I was at the age when I wanted to be like my group in high school and my group happened to be Jewish. This did not sit well with my mother and shocked me. She grabbed my Girl Scout uniform brown leather belt and chased after me, flailing at my bare legs as I ran for cover. "Life is hard enough. If you're a Jew it's even harder"she screamed. I know she meant well, but it didn't feel that way at the time. What I remember most, apart from the facet that I probably needed to watch my mouth around my mother more, was that her glamorous airline ticket clerk friend, Flora, who wasn't even related to me, was trying to protect me. And that's worth a helluva lot, especially to a child about to be brutalized. (I blame the nuns by the way for the brutality thing, because I know my mother loved me...).

So this week, Flora means going to the local flower market early in the morning and gathering blooms and branches for some arrangements this weekend. The market is in a very seedy part of town and the hour is early enough that I can expect to pass a number of floppy unwashed people who haven't quite finished the night's escapades. Especially with mind-altering substances, whether in bottle or other form.

The word Flora, whether a woman's name or flower has become for me a symbol of (bear with me now) redemption, a force of balance amid the darker expressions of life. And for some reason today, despite the lovely sunshine striping my already yellow sofa, there is a tiny shadow. It might be the darker afternoons now the clocks have been turned back. Something creeps into the air around this time and I remember that a woman who didn't love me particularly, protected me, and that when I drive through the downtown dirty streets with a car loaded with flowers, I am lifted through what would otherwise be great sadness seeing so many apparently suffering souls. Here's to Flora, with great gratitude today.