PRIDE
flowers flowers flowers
This is a hard posting of a note that I want to keep around. I didn’t mean to write this, it fell out when I saw someone talk about florists, whose profession carries a lot of stigma. Florists are very often gay. The suicide rate amongst them per capita is staggering.
My grandmother, Billie Doris, often just Bill, was a florist who ran her own business for several decades, by herself, in the reddest part of the deep American South (read VERY sexist and bigoted), after my grandfather knocked her teeth out in 1960. The local Southern Baptist Church expelled my grandmother, mother and uncle, but not my grandfather. I only met that man once.
I am pretty sure my grandmother was gay. Butchy, kept a beard best-friend man who was maybe also gay. I never saw either of them with a love interest, and they were clearly just best friends and fishing buddies otherwise. She was probably in love with her other friend, who she was with or talked to every day for 60 years. Verdell was her friends name. She was similarly single for most of her life. Maybe she and my grandmother were lovers at one point, I don’t know. There could never be any evidence, as it would have meant extreme danger, here in Georgia, USA. Verdell never missed my birthday. The first year I realized no card was coming was when I really learned what death means, personally. Other deaths followed quickly, including my saintly grandmother. My mother grows lots of flowers and keeps them in her house, always tastefully displayed, in silent tribute to these women.
My other grandmother was a dairy farmer, and grew prize roses by the hundreds and many other vanity flowers. She ran the family dairy with my grandfather for 40 years, and by herself after my grandfather died, who was a nice man but I didn’t really know him. He was diagnosed with very advanced prostate cancer and decided to end his life with a shotgun, in the rose garden, instead of going to the hospital. He waited as long as he possibly could to do it, and I remember the last time I saw him and how happy he seemed to be. He had shed his ego. He was already dead. My grandmother endured, but accidently killed herself with Paraquat (if Round-Up is milk, Paraquat is cream) that dotted her cigarette as she sprayed the weeds around the gladiolas, which my grandfather loved. It took her days to die in the hospital, melting from the inside, having smoked one of the most toxic chemicals ever to hit the market. It had been banned for years, but the farm had a back-supply.
I keep flowers around me all the time, and tattooed them on my forearm, so I can see them any time I need. During the times I am locked up, they help me stay myself, and not descend completely into the person I have to become to survive county jails.
I am often cringe as hell, getting indignant about abuse of women and gay people, though I am neither of those things and have been on the wrong side of abuse when I was younger and stupider than I am now. I think I learned from that mistake. I’m a cishet white man from the South. I know what my indignation looks like, and it sucks. White Knight, pandering for pussy. That dynamic is real, for a lot of people, I suppose.
If you’ve ever wondered why I am the way I am, now you know. It’s because of people who grow and arrange flowers, all that implies, and all they endure.
