In Lieu of Flowers

Someone said we live in a perptual state of contradiction. We love those who don't love us and are loved by those we don't love. Some talk but don't listen while others listen but don't talk. People spend a lot of time wondering what life is about. There are book shelves full of books telling you how to be happy. Gurus and motivational speakers make millions convincing us that this or that is the way to a better existence. Then there is religion which says despite how much we suffer, or how miserable our life is, if we follow the rules and suffer though it adequately so, we will be rewarded with a life eternal in some sort of unknown paradise. There are hundreds of religions which explain the purpose of our existence and offer us a similar roadmap to an afterlife, with the caveat that we worship only their God or all is null and void. They all claim there is something more than this. I imagine they have to. No one wants to worship a religion that says this is all there is. That there is nothing else. I never thought much of it until lately. Not even when we go to church, Rose. What is life? Why do we all persist? I've had over a half century to consider it, but I never have. 

It's all a hotel to me. We sign in to a registry and we are here for a period of time and then we die and someone replaces us as we have replaced someone else. That's the way it goes. The room decor will change. The drapes. The carpet. The blankets. Some of us stay a short while and others stay longer. We stick around for the continental breakfast. We wait for the cleaning lady to push that squeaky trashcan to our room and we thank her, politely, though we will never see her or the room again. We feel bad for not leaving a tip. We should have left a tip, we say looking up at her trashcan on wheels on the second level of the motor lodge from the front seat of our station wagon which hosts a weird Little Bighorn sort of diorama of interstate bugs on the windshield. Custer is a dragonfly. But there is another room down the road to get to. Another cleaning lady with the same rosary hanging from her trashcan to ward off bloody mattresses, dried carpet vomit, and bedbugs. I've spoken to plenty of cleaning ladies in my day and you'd be amazed at what they find in vacated rooms. Someone should write a book. I've never bothered to tell you this before, have I? When you asked how was my trip, did I ever even reply other than to say, 'It was fine, dear.'? Did I ever even say dear? Did I kiss you hello when I came home? We are all traveling business men and women who have forgotten our way. Lost in the flux of profit and cost and taxes and expenditures - invaluable time. Or do I just say so simply to comfort myself into believing in this confederacy of lost men I find myself to belong for the sake to belong?

Home, they tell us, is this place or that one and if we don't believe it, we will never get there. Dorothy clicks her heels and says what she says whenever someone watches the movie and without fail she is home. Back in Kansas. If we lie and cheat and steal and curse and gamble and philander and all sorts of other things, we will never find it. We will be quietly disqualified. Blacklisted. We will be on an endless road rather than the promised one. We've never been home. We've only been in this temporary hotel. But we are supposed to have an appreciation of home and be making our way there through pious living, though we don't know where it is exactly. Maybe someone will find us. A guide. Maybe someone will knock on our door and we will follow them and that will be it. I bet he will be an Indian with a feather headdress. So do not despair if you don't like your present accomodations. But do not enjoy your present accomodations too much so. Nothing lasts forever. It is all going to be over before you know it. 

I don't know if that makes a damn bit of sense to you. But you once told me that I wasn't pensive enough. Is that the right word? You said I don't ever think abstractly or metaphorically. I was as concrete as the birdbath in the garden. That I didn't care about things the way I should. That all I care about is coffee, baseball, beer and my job. Selling something to someone for some gratification you said you could not understand. I suppose you were right to say so and this is my humble effort to correct my wrongs and hopefully to impress you because you are all that matters, Rose. Even if I never said so. In lieu of flowers, I give you all my wistful and ruminative thoughts. Some men just don't make a habit of thinking worldly things. It isn't in us. We think about the World Series and if our team will make it. And when it is obvious they won't, we fold our interest for the season until football begins to which we transfer interest. Or we watch the young kid coming up who will put us over the top next year and then the furnace kicks on and the next thing we know it's Christmas. 

In lieu of flowers, I gave you baseball. How many baseball games have you been to with me, Rose? A hundred? And in all that time you never once complained and I never once asked you if you were having a good time. Did I? I supposed that you were. You were like my shadow. Sometimes when I got caught up in the game or keeping score with that little pencil and card, which always baffled you because you said the scoreboard was right there, pointing emphatically, I nearly forgot you were there. We are too old now to go to ballgames, aren't we? But wouldn't it be fun to go again? One more. I promise not to keep score this time, Rose. I'll explain the game to you and not snap when you ask too many questions. I'll ask you if you want something other than the hot dogs and beer I always bought us. I won't presume you like what I like anymore. I won't bicker with you about parking closer. I'll spend the extra few bucks so you don't have to walk so far. Better yet, in lieu of flowers, I'll drop you off at the gate and I'll walk. And when the game is over, I'll pick you up. 

I've stayed in a thousand lousy hotels in about every state and Canada selling these damn things. I've sold so many I sometimes forget what the hell they are until I unlatch a case and look inside. Oh, yeah, I say. Those doohickeys. I've been to Mexico, but you haven't. I've been to California too many times to recall and you always asked me what the Golden Gate Bridge looked like and if I ever went to Alcatraz. You used to smile when you asked me these things and sometimes I used to snap at you and say it looks like the goddamn Golden Gate Bridge and add bitterly that I have no interest in visiting Alcatraz. It's a decaying prison covered in bird and seal shit. Didn't I say that once? And you got frightened when I cursed aggressively. You covered the kids' ears and said, "Daddy didn't mean that." And I replied, angry that you were defending me, that I most certainly did and I accused you of needling me. Or smothering me. Some absurd thing. I never took you out of the country. I never took you to another state, but to Florida that one time. Or was it South Carolina? Those beaches are all the same to me, you know. You told me a time or two how much you would like to go camping, but I never bought us a camper. Maybe when I get home this time, Rose. We are not too old to camp in some plush RV. To find ourselves again now that the kids are grown and gone wherever they've gone. We all get lost along the way, don't we? Where did the kids go?

I have big plans. To rejuvenate our life. I don't use the plural because when we got married the pastor said our lives became one life and I suppose he was right. Your life became mine. I absorbed you into me over the years until you were little more than an empty dress. I can't remember much else of what he said. But I suppose he was right because though I spent so much time on the road selling these things, we were half a person most of the time. Actually, you were half a person. I was a person and a half. I took and never gave. You gave and never took. In lieu of flowers, I am giving you these words. This is my elongated, long-overdue, sincere apology because a simple "I'm sorry" would not be adequate. Would it, Rose? 

The company always said I had good personality and if there was an award for personality, I'd get it every year when they gave awards and hams out at the Christmas Party. I won salesman of the year a dozen or more times. How many watches and trophies and plaques did I get? How many tie tacks and pairs of commemorative cufflinks? Someday they will be pitched in a garbage heap because they do not matter to anyone. No one wants someone else's trophies. I've sold more than anyone in my company. I suppose that's why the company keeps me around and keeps me on the road, you know? I am a loyal man, Rose. A company man. Through and through. We talked about this at the Christmas Party that year. Years and years ago. When you said I should quit to stay home and spend time with you and the kids. Your father had a job for me in his lumberyard. But I'm loyal, Rose. I was just getting started! They gave me an opportunity and there's no reason to quit. I'm a company man, Rose. Through and through. They depend upon me. I'm their number one guy, you know. They need me on the west coast. Or in Montana and Wyoming. I know those people in the Dakotas. No one knows those parts like I do. I've got good connections and strong relationships. Especially on the reservations. Things like that are invaluable. 

The TV is on and I feel silly writing you letters after all this time, of paying attention to you after years of ignoring you, but I suppose, if I am being honest, I'm imploring you not to go. I don't want you to leave me. I feel strange sitting at this hotel table and writing on hotel stationary all these words that were never there until they suddenly showed up like old family and friends to a funeral. They come to life like those creatures in that drive-in movie we saw on our first date all them years ago. Out of nothing. Out of a black pond. Or was it empty space? You felt sorry for them, didn't you? You always felt sorry for whatever oversexed creature it was that came to Earth or came up from the bottom of the lagoon and was killed. For King Kong. You cried, I remember. I laughed at you. I suppose I didn't know what else to do but to laugh because I never understood you. You were a strange person to me, Rose. You always loved people you didn't know and you cried for children and babies and monsters and deer at hunting season and animals scattered along the road. At least, despite my various faults, I never hunted. I never made you to suffer a deer head mounted on the dining room wall. Staring at you with those glass eyes. You would have cried everytime you saw him. I bet you would have put him in the basement when I wasn't home and got it out just before I came. You cared more for bunny rabbits and stray kittens and wiggly worms washed out on sidewalks and flies in windows than anyone who ever lived. If there was an award for empathy, you're name and face would be on it. The Rose G. Berry Award of Empathy. 

You used to write me letters and leave them in my lunch box that you'd pack for me before I left home on my trips. You sat them right on top of the thermos so I couldn't miss them. I used to hate those letters. Sometimes I wouldn't read them at all. Sometimes I tossed them out the window. Something about Bobby needing braces and a new baseball mit, or Julie getting her first visit from Aunt Flo and wanting to go to church camp with the Harold girl. Something about you being lonely and that there are only so many soap operas and magazines in the world, Bill, you used to pine. You were going to try some pills. Or you wanted to lose weight. Or you wanted me to love you like I used to love you. But when did I ever adequately love you, Rose? When did I ever? I got so drunk the day before we married I could hardly stand through our wedding. I was drunk when we had both our kids. At least I was there, you said. At least I came home. He had an important business trip he cancelled, you volleyed with your mother who could smell the whisky on my breath. You always defended me. I needn't have ever defended myself. I had you on permanent retainer. Despite the harassment of your letters and the begging for something more than I ever gave you, you defended me. 

I don't deserve your loyalty. Your love. You would close every letter with "I love you, Bill." If it wasn't so silly to consider us two old fogies parting ways and finding love in this world, I'd tell you to go. Or I would just tell you that I am not ever coming home. You don't write those letters to me anymore, Rose. Maybe that is why I wrote you from every hotel on this trip and for the last year or so. Why I've sent you postcards I used to send to the kids when they were little. Of all the places you wanted to go.  Closing them with, "I wish you were here. I love you, Rose." In lieu of flowers, I give you The Grand Tetons. The Alamo. Yellowstone. The Old Vegas strip. I can't come home this week, dear, I'm a company man. Through and through. They need me out here a while longer. They need a man with my connections and personality and we need the money. Didn't we always need the money?

They say women sometimes make love to milkmen. To postmen. To grocery store butchers. Or to insurance salesmen who used to come door to door. They say men ought to be concerned of the fidelity of their wives, especially when their wife is lonely and feeling neglected. They're particularly vulnerable. Men who truck or travel or who stay at the office too late are "especially susceptible of having the virtues of their wives most delicate privy picked." Doesn't that sound silly, Rose? Like a god-awful nursery rhyme. I read it in one of those smutty men's magazines that you abhor. I am not unfaithful, Rose, nor do I believe you are to me. I have such a faith and assurance in the quality of your character that I sleep easy a thousand miles away while you are home alone. I never considered it. Not even when the warnings were written in the glossy pages of those lurid magazines that were full of images of cheating spouses engaged in fornication in the most titillating and precarious of ways with inveigling milkmen and postmen and grocery store butchers and insurance salesmen. Those naughty housewives were never you. I miss those letters, Rose. I miss our day-to-day problems and planning some modest vacation or our small talk of what we will get the kids for Christmas. I miss calling you from a payphone or you calling the hotel room when I got settled. All those things I once acted as though I'd rather do without, I miss them. 

I think you would like San Antonio. I need to bring you here sometime. Maybe since the kids are grown and the grandkids are mostly grown, you ought to come on the road with me for a stretch. I have been meaning to ask you, but I have wanted to ask you face-to-face. I think you'd like Sedona, Arizona. The red rock faces. The shops. You once remarked about a postcard I sent the kids years ago from Tuscon. Those cactus birds. Love birds, they call them. They are not native to the area. They are tropical birds. Parrots and parakeets and whatever else they sell in those pet stores. They escaped their cages wherever they lived and they migrated to Arizona and bred freely. Isn't that remarkable? There is something very wonderful about the word "escape" to me, which makes me wonder, do you still like that Pina Colada song? 

In lieu of flowers, we ought to have drinks sometime. You know. At one of the bars downtown where the highbrows go to compare the highness of their brows. A couple of old fogies like us and our gray out-of-place heads in a posh bar shooting the breeze, taking about tropical birds and old times, playing Johnny Mathis on the jukebox. But they don't have jukeboxes anymore, do they? They've thwarted our plan in advance. They must have seen us coming. We must not have been the first old couple to think of such an overt act of age warfare on a younger generation that would rather not mingle with us socially. That would rather us die sometime out of the way and in our sleep to make it easier on everyone. That old bar we used to go to once in a blue moon closed up, didn't it? It became a new-age church like practically every other defunct business in town. Or is it a tattoo parlor? I believe they had the last jukebox around. You sang karaoke there once, but I don't remember the song. 

I am in another city. I don't remember which. Sacramento, maybe. Or is this Spokane? I suppose I got lost somewhere and drove several hours out of my way. These damn hotels aren't the same anymore. They change them so much it's hard to keep them straight. You don't get a key anymore. You get a keycard. You used to be able to count on a Holiday Inn every 40 miles or so. You used to be able to drive Route 66 and have your choice of places lit up in neon lights with friendly people coming and going in Buicks and motorbikes. With busy diners and gas stations and shops along the way. It ain't like that anymore, Rose. It is bypasses and interstates and suites and pretend luxury hotels and cookie-cutter motor lodges filled with nefarious types or illegals who are working nearby and living there. They hang their clothes to dry from the balcony because the hotel drier is usually broken or because it costs too much. I stayed at a place in San Diego they called "The Maternity Ward." All day and night women were having babies. Immigrants who came over the border had their babies in this hotel and that baby was automatically an American citizen, despite his mother and father both being illegals. It was a beautiful thing to me because I know you would have felt it was beautiful and I still believe we are one person. Even a thousand miles apart. One fused life. You could hear babies cry their first cries. They knew no language. No countries. None of our rules. They didn't know the poverty they were born into. Their parents' struggle. They were full of possibility and hope and love. There was no hate or suspicion born into them. I thought as I lied there so near my departure from this place and they so early in their entry, that it was my time to go. It sometimes feels as though I am stealing air. I am crowding others. The water I bathe with could be better served giving someone a drink or watering crops to feed hungry mouths. In lieu of flowers, Rose, I give you my sudden bout of sincere selflessness. 

I thought about my funeral. What you would do without me coming home once in a while to bother you. To mow the grass and dig the weeds. To watch TV and fall asleep in my recliner. To waste more time watching games that don't matter all. To walk whatever dog it is we have these days. I can't remember him or her. I get the names confused, but it all comes back to me when I get there, doesn't it? It all comes back as it should and it falls right into place. I lost the jitterbug phone you bought me for my birthday last year in some diner. And finding a payphone these days would only be a little less remarkable than finding a leprechaun's pot-of-gold. I was going to surprise you with a call, but I couldn't. I wanted to know what you thought of the letters I've been sending you. The postcards. I wanted to know if they are okay in lieu of the flowers I never bought you. I wanted to know what you are doing with your hair. What color you want to paint the kitchen walls. Where you want to go on vacation when I buy that RV. You can get one of those motor club memberships you always talked about. Plan the trip months ahead so we hit all the right places along the way. We can have pina coladas when we get there. 

I scribbled the last letter I sent you from a little roadside diner in Albuquerque, New Mexico. An authentic Mexican place. They sold the bottles of Mexican coke with real cane sugar. It was called Rosita's and I thought of how I used to playfully call you Rosita when we were young and you made tacos for us and the kids. It made me smile. I told the waitress and she smiled, too. Then I showed her pictures and, well, that's all I have. In lieu of flowers, you're in these thoughts. That is what they said, isn't it? In lieu of flowers. I don't know why I have been stuck on those words since then. I don't remember anything very well anymore. My memories are much like the heat lightening is here in the desert at night. There are quick and brilliant sporadic flashes of gold like someone who teases someone else who is too slow to catch it. The Gods play these games with us, I imagine. Or maybe it is how they communicate. Maybe they're telling me something. I don't know. Just like I don't know that those colorful parrots and parakeets really escaped from their suburban cages all over the country and ended up here or if someone just put them there. If God put them here and the lovebird story is just someone's explanation for the anomaly of their habitat. I don't know why God put you in such a place and time that we would end up together, for me to fail you the way that I did. Just as I don't know why I could never find my way home. Why meaningless places and doohickeys seemed to mean more to me than you. 

"In lieu of flowers...?" he asked me, tapping his pen on a pad. 

"Dad?" Julie said softly. She has your empathy. I just stared at the gold clock on his desk. 

"Those are what I sell," I told him proudly. "That is an Amherst-McGreevey Clock! I sell those! I've sold them for 55 years! All models. These here were one of my best sellers!" 

Julie rubbed my back and told him they'd get back to him before the funeral. He nodded and told me it is a fine clock.  

You loved everything so equitably it was hard to choose one thing for people to donate to in your name. Unborn babies. Sick kids with cancer. Stray kittens. Wounded veterans. The homeless. Abused dogs. Rabbits. Old horses with sloped backs. Polar bears. Penguins. Seals. Foxes. Forests. The ocean. Or monsters from lagoons or space. In lieu of flowers, appreciate your wife. Go home before their is no home to go home to. You were my home. And when they layed you to rest in the ground either I became a worm or I became homeless. Julie and Bobby both said I could come live with them, of course, but, you know. I was never good about staying anywhere too long. I had to get back on the road, Rose. People need clocks. They need to know what time it is. How much time they have left. And Amherst-McGreevey needs a man of my reputation out there. I have to sell twice my quota to put braces on Bobby's teeth and to pay for college. I am loyal, Rose. I am a company man. Through and through. 

I'm lost and there's supposed to be another hotel up ahead, but it isn't there anymore. My old, worn Rand-McNally has let me down. Maybe if I let you get that motor club membership I could plan ahead better next time. Maybe if I let you help me chart my course like you always wanted to do when I would snap about you not knowing anything about the road, I wouldn't get lost. I was hard to live with, wasn't I? Through my bad moods that came too often. 

I will have to find another hotel. Maybe one with a pool. I think I'll leave a tip for the cleaning lady this time. I'll wear my good blue suit to bed and pin a rose to my lapel. I'll fold my hands myself over my chest. I hardly doubt finding me lying there on top of an otherwise undisturbed bed will make their list of strange things. In lieu of flowers, in this last letter on hotel stationary, I send all my love to you. You are my lovebird. Maybe life is a cage and this is to escape. And maybe there is a cactus for us somewhere in Arizona. I am sorry I wasn't the man you deserved in this life. But maybe I'll see you again in the next life, after the Indian comes.