Some Flowers for Emily
July 7, 2005
This is Emily’s birthday. I had warned her that I was going to get up early and hang a big colorful sign over the entrance to the Folger Library: “Happy Birthday Emily.” She did not believe me, and she would not have been happy, having to endure all those polite well-wishings. We decided to have a nice private day.
While she was in class at the Folger.. studying manuscripts of personal letters from the Renaissance.. I walked around our neighborhood looking to take pictures of the prettiest flowers. Washington is not the most temperate place to live in the summer, but it is surely healthy for flowers. Front yards are bursting with colors and green growth, with the aid of water from the thunderstorms that come through every few days. I did not feel like leaning into a stranger’s yard and clipping pretty flowers.. as a gift for Emily.. so I took pictures and then bought some flowers from an outdoor vendor at the Eastern Market.
I browsed a cramped used bookstore near the Market, but it is not easy to buy books for either one of us.. we are so picky. I thought maybe some hardcover by Jeanette Winterson would turn up, but came up blank. The gift that is guaranteed to win smiles from Emily is that of Luna Bars.. especially if they are her new favorite flavor: iced oatmeal raisin. When she walked into our little apartment, she saw a little table with three things: a little glass vase with flowers, a box of Luna Bars, and a DVD of Neil Young’s Greendale.
It turned out to be an odd day to choose for a private day, as it brought very public news: the subway bombings in London. This grouping of bombs hit home for us since back in March we used two of the affected stations: Edgeware Road and Russel Court Square. It is a small connection, but still it is a reminder that big events have the power to reach into private worlds and shatter them.. How many hundreds of private days were interrupted.. some forever.. by those bombs?
Ours ended peacefully, and it is hard not to rhapsodize on the joys of our private world.. and how nice it would be to always have just a little apartment and be able to walk across the street to the big library.. and if we had our little dog Quinn, it would all be perfect. But in a few minutes I will head out to get on a metro train.. which we see in the newspapers are now heavily guarded. Someday in the future we will travel more, and our private world will be a little more vulnerable.. but as Blair said yesterday, our basic duty is not to retreat and live in fear: “We will not be terrorized.”
At the end of the day, in our little apartment, we watched Greendale.. perhaps our tradition for Emily’s birthday. Thinking about it now, it is also about an interruption in private life.. and the grand-daughter Sun Green finally becomes an activist:
sun green started makin’ waves
on the day her grandpa died
speakin’ out against anything
unjust or packed with lies
And here, in our private world, begins responsibility.
