A few days back I’d decided to pick a bouquet of Dame’s Rocket. If there’s a bouquet of flowers on the table that is pleasant. If there isn’t any there for the next twelve months, I won’t particularly care. My wife is nearly always appreciative and that’s reason enough to grab some flowers on my bike ride every so often.
Yesterday I identified a new flower that had popped up on the little deer trail between our house and the rail trail: Narrow Leaved, Blue Eyed Grass is a fairly literal name, but it’s descriptive and relates back to something that conjures up what it was you saw. Heading out today I passed th little flowers and determined to pick a few on the way back home. And when I did, it occurred to me that these needn’t necessarily be turned over to the Mrs. These blue eyes might look swell on my desk, so I found a brandy snifter and placed them all in it with some tap water.
They all close right up after I plucked them, and I figured this was to have been a failed experiment. They closed up into small little opium balls, sockets of blue eyes that no longer gaze out on anything. But lo. Adjusting to the water, considering the afternoon sun most of the oblong balls have opened back up into the simple six petal flowers with their yellow core. The dozen or so wispy Narrow Leaves wouldn’t make much of a bouquet for anyone else, but as an observational experiment, they are wonderful. Let’s see how long they last.
My little one and I are enjoying “East Goes West” by Younghill Kang. I’d caught a salutary essay on the man and this work by Ed Kang in the NYRB a few months back and bought it right away. Writing in the 1930s when there was no “Korea” from which to hail from, I wanted my younger one to consider Korean engagement with New York from an earlier, more challenging epoch. As the Park essay had suggested, the writing is fresh and urgent, marveling at New York and as I’d hoped, affording a different view into the city through a vehicle she is interested in.
Wednesday, 06/10/20
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