This flower grew especially for you...

Monet's Nympheas...


No matter whom my mother visits, no matter who she visited, whether rich or poor her humility, her graciousness and her manners are impeccable. When she visits relatives in India, she equally spends time with those old acquaintances that she remembers from her youth, and knowing that they are probably giving her their all, she sits cross legged with them on the floor, and I hold her in the highest regard, because she never for one moment talks of Asians the way others might which is sometimes negatively. Instead you can see the esteem others hold her in because of the way that all her photos show her with arms around her. Wherever she goes there is this need by people to be close to her, to touch her, and to feel her love around them.

When I walk past a 'poor one', a 'tramp', my heart sinks.

I simply feel the pain; the most acute sense of powerlessness and say quietly under my breath, 'There but for the Grace of God... go I'.

When I worked at the Tennis Centre, part-time, after college, there used to be a man who clearly was 'falling down'.

He had lost his wife to a dreadful pain wrenching divorce; she had simply given up on him when he lost his job. She could not forgive him once she realised that he had carried on pretending for several weeks that he still had a position, to the point of taking his briefcase, and sitting in the park outside the Tennis Centre... until his supposed office hours were over.


Auguste Macke's wonderful painting is in the Ludwig Museum. Simply entitled, 'Man reading in a park, painted in 1914'.


Can you imagine this, poor man just sitting there looking into space, disheartened and magnetised to the wood and metal of the bench, feeling the despair of the those looking up from the gutter, a position that allows the widest perspective.

His nervous breakdown occurred due to his unremitting remorse at losing a parent.

The girls at the Tennis Centre (apart from a beautiful woman called Lorraine, a hard working intelligent Sagittarian) sneered cruelly behind his back, and acted appallingly uncaringly towards him.

I would usually be doing some admin. He would arrive, then I would hear their sarcasm, and his voice would stutter, becoming worse as their subtle barbs heightened, tightening his vocal cords with self-consciousness, his entry-wounds bare and exposed.

Okay, so if they thought I was going to stand there and allow it, yeah right!

I would quickly emerge, and ask him he needed a coffee, then get my purse and pay for one from the machine. I would glare at the girls, but not to embarrasse him by drawing attention to their pathetic conduct, therefore validating it.

After he would leave, they would try to engage me in some kind of pitiful dialogue, telling me about his many histrionics, his numerous letters to the police about some imagined persecution, or his (manic depression) fantastic letters to the Town Hall, complaining about some small annoying hole down his road. They would tell me that he had money due to his inheritances, and they considered him a waste of space.

Mostly they laughed at his stuttering and actually went so far as to imitate it.

...There but for the Grace of God go I....

'Weak is as weak does'.

Now here is what they did not know.

This man did not stutter around me, when I was alone, he would come in, and he would buy ME a machine-delivered drink. He was never the nuisance that had been represented to me; instead he was a remarkably intelligent man.

With thoughtfulness he shared his homemade sandwich with me, which I was too polite to refuse. But always, he found me a rose or shrub that had bloomed that very day in the Park.

He carried it in - wrapped in the foil or paper he had finished his lunch in, its damp stem would be covered in soft breadcrumbs, and it would look so limp, as if it had waited too long to be handed to me.

He would place it on the counter for me, then he would point at it's stamens, its pollen as it fell and coated his finger tips, and he would lift it's head as if it were a dead thing, a swan's neck limp. He would tell me something specifically factual about the nature of its hybrid species. He knew his horticulture, then he would with clear dulcet tones explain to me how he felt when his wife left, how shattered his existence was, how he had been an Engineer on so much money for so long, and then in an instance this was taken away from him, and he would then pull a leaf from the flower, and say 'like this... just like this.'

Poignantly, he carefully, broke off a petal; perhaps one that to his engineer’s eye of seeking perfect symmetry, and geometry, he thought it spoilt the design of the object.
Conscientiously he turned the paper from a corner so that the flower was seen from another angle, immersing himself in its flawlessness. He was a Capricorn, he had been born an only child, beloved of his parents, with a bookish middle-class affluence, where his father toiled long and hard in his office and his mother’s sole objective all day was to be there for her son and husband.

He was so grateful to his mother, and his father’s break up from his mother had made him determined to maintain his own marriage, long after it had become toxic.

I would know not to pick up the flower until he offered it to me, because at this point he was using it as a prop to his self-exposure. He would tell me how he picked up his wife's jumper the one she had left in the laundry basket, which she meant to wash, or take. He described that he held it close, and smelt her perfume, which was some thing cheap like 'Charlie'. He had not bought her this cheap perfume, he knew she was with a new man, and it left him betrayed, without purpose and he left his home each morning still all these years... (His misfortune was several years back).

He spoke to me in a well-modulated, perfectly relaxed voice, pitched at the same level and with a similar sound as Harrison Ford. He spoke to me softly, telling me that he was allowing himself to disintegrate. He would describe how he looked in the mirror and inconsolably just wept. He felt the enormity of his loneliness it ached within him and he felt, outside of the world, where friends were few, and countless rudeness from strangers was the one thing he could count on.

He told me that I was the first person to smile at him and to treat him as a human outside of the special services such as the Town Hall, or Police, who were always kind to him and that he could not help trying to gain some attention from them because of his need for human connection.

I asked what I could do to help him. He said, very clearly to me, ‘Nothing, just stay on this pedestal, I have placed you on, just stay there, it is a small measure of hope for me’. I asked what this pedestal was, I did not understand. He replied, that it was like being in love with the unattainable, but that he wasn’t in love with me, just that it was a bit like that.

He was in love with the love he had felt for his wife, in Life’s kinder days. He said that just my smiling at him, and that when I then stopped dead in my tracks and asked him if he was okay, because that particular day he had to sit down he was feeling particularly depressed, and I went to get him a glass of water.

Imagine all he wanted was ‘simple hope’.

He said that when I had placed my cool hand across his forehead, (I remembered that day), he had immediately reached for my wrist, and said, he was fine because no-one had actually shown him any kindness for around 4 years. He said he was so alone, and felt completely disregarded and invisible to the World.

He told me that it was incomprehensible to him how he could have fallen to this point; he had been so successful, with the semblance of a normal life, or so it seemed to him. How hurt he had been when, drifting into a semi-vagrancy but for his inheritance: that his old acquaintances turned their faces from him when he walked by. He seemed to be searching for answers and it occurred to me he was asking the Universe the wrong questions.

BUT not at the time I knew him, because I was too young to know how to guide him if at all, I was only about 20ish.

The only nervousness he displayed was that he would run his long restless fingers through his hair, and when particularly dynamic he appeared to have a habit of folding his arms close around his body, then releasing himself… As if it had been a long, long time since he was last held. He knew he was self-destructive but he wanted to continue doing this because it meant he was alive.

He always varied his reminisces, but he did the same thing each time which was that when he was finished, I knew, because he lifted this corpse of a beautiful flower in two hands and placed it out to me as if I were a ballerina who had just completed Swan Lake...

‘Be a good girl, and put it in water now, it grew especially for you – you know!’

Then he nodded almost clicking his heels to me, as a salute, and as if he had just given me some special kind of formal declaration or missive and left.



...by Xsapph