De Ce Monde Secret de l’ Amelie Americaine

I bought my first carnation today. This was a big step. It was not that I hated carnations, but I avoided them like you avoid the restaurant where your ex-boyfriend took you on your first date. The experience tickled all of your pleasurable senses, but the thought of looking at the table where you shared your first kiss, knowing how the story ended, is too much to bear. And being the vibrant, forward-thinking, keep the momentum going toward the blessed future, personality type, you’re trying to avoid anything that might trigger a moment of regret or depression.

So you avoid these triggers, like you avoid Dan Fogelberg on Lite FM and those nifty holiday songs remade by an aging pop star. These commodities of modern life are suppose to sooth away the winter blues, but instead make you go into endless emotional loops like a song that won’t get out of your head.

This is why I kept pink carnations at bay. I read somewhere that smell is the one sense that goes right to the memory centers of the brain without being processed first. This means that you experience the memory and the associated emotions before any astute reasoning, or calm affirmations can even enter your consciousness. There is no emotional protection, if a memory has been associated with a particular smell.

The problem is, I love pink carnations. I love their ultra floral smell, their tight pink ruffles, and the way, when you touch them, they spring back to life. They are resilient, even when they are drying out, they don’t easily brown or loose their bloom. One of the few concrete memories I have of my birth mother was a moment when she reached out of her catatonic state and attempted to embrace a bit of life. She wanted flowers.

She drove us to the local nursery. She spent hours choosing one flower, or it seemed like hours, as I repeated begged her to buy me one as well. She refused. I pouted. The intolerable boredom wore on, until finally she made her selection and we left.

My sour attitude continued as a I sat in the back of her VW bug and she drove us home. When we entered the a apartment I plopped myself onto the couch, in the full swing of my emotional blackmail. The game was up. She unwrapped the white paper that protected her flowers and there it was a single pink carnation. She handed me my flower, and my mood deftly shifted, like just someone who had just gotten her way.

I caressed and smelled my flower as she left the room to find a vase. The smell was intense, and reminded me a tropical place I had never been. In my imagination I saw Hawaiian dancers in grass skirts wearing flower necklaces and a single happy flower perched in their long flowing hair. I took my flower and pulled off the bud from the stem and plopped it into my own hair.

I got up and started to dance around the room dreaming of another world thousands of miles away, when she reentered the room, and stared dumbfounded. She was furious that I had ruined my flower so quickly, and berated me as if I had broken her favorite trinket.

I didn’t understand what I had done, but felt the gap between us widen, confused that my happiness would be perceived betrayal to her, not understanding that her lack of appropriate and proportional reaction over a 60 cent flower was a indication of a much deeper problem. Instead I stared the carnation that had brought me so much joy only moments before and felt sad and angry. She took the flower and tossed it.

Almost twenty years later when I tried for the last time to reunite with my birth mother, the unspoken truth between us was that I was not the daughter she had expected. I think she thought I would turn out more like her. Instead I was more of a composite of the many women who had filled in during her absence. I had been shaped by a very different set experiences and this had enabled me to make very different choices.

How could this have happened? My grandmother use to accidently yell out her name when she called out for me. My aunt said that I had her button nose. Even her evil cousin use to comment that I must be introverted because I had emotional problems just like her.

For all those years I had wanted nothing more than to look in the mirror and understand the reflection I saw. Yet the sad miracle was twenty years later, the differences between us could not have been more obvious. I was not her. I had become someone else and this surprised everyone, but most of all it dumbfounded her.

Today the only fact I cling to is that I love pink carnations, they no longer make me sad, and that is enough.

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