Can we just let Molly keep talking about me?
I really like that a lot better.
I have so many things to say, and I just
have to do that before I read you my little story.
Because I came here at the kind invitation of Richard and Lois
Shelton, 26 years ago, for the first time as a poet actually.
It was the first time I was invited anywhere
to read my work, and I was so frightened.
And I was treated so beautifully,
and it means a lot to me to be back here again.
And I have very, very close friends here,
including my dear, Cynthia Keyworth,
who we went to graduate school together at Iowa.
She's come.
And, of course, Alison Deming and Fenton Johnson,
who are colleagues I admire, and cherish, and require.
And I pretty well decided that they're
going to have to get the firemen to get me out
of my place at the Adobe Rose.
I like it here.
I'm not going.
I'm really happy to be here, and I'm
going to read to you a chapter probably
unwisely but from the middle of the memoir
that's coming out next year called The Florist's Daughter.
And I think all I need to tell you about this really
is that this is about the downtown store of where
my dad worked, the flower shop my dad worked in,
and there's also reference to a greenhouse, which
is in a different location near the Czech neighborhood, working
class neighborhood, where I was born.
My mother figures here, and at one point,
she always read the astrology thing in the morning to us.
And as a Pisces, I always had a very disappointing kind
of passive, indecisive, obscure kind of thing.
And she would often say, ah, too bad,
but she always read my father's and my brothers'.
They were the bull as men should be, and she was Leo the lion.
So she's referred to by that, so this is chapter
five of the Florist's Daughter.
Just like downtown, my aunt Lillian
said of anything so marvelous, so
looks that it descriptive requirements billowed
beyond mere superlatives.
Just like downtown, something really wonderful
had to be awarded high end real estate.
My agoraphobic aunt who never left home
gave us what became our family's paradisal metaphor.
Just like downtown, a curious figure of speech for a woman
terrified of leaving the house, but just
right for the yearning and the provincial heart.
The flower company's retail shop at Fifth and St. Peter
did exist in a zone of glamor, except it wasn't just
like downtown.
It was downtown a world away from the workaday greenhouse
on Banville Street near the immigrant houses
and their cottage gardens.
The store's big windows and displays changed by my father
by the month or to suit the season weren't in St. Paul
as we were in St. Paul and as the greenhouse was in St. Paul.
The downtown store conveyed a fugitive air of New York, maybe
even Paris that had strayed somehow
to the block of shops curving past the St. Paul Hotel.
It was directly across the street from Bullard's Jewelers
whose haughty display windows were
small peepholes that enticed, and yet, kept you at bay.
Bullard's was like church, hushed, mysterious, trafficking
in jewels and sterling silver.
There were emblems of the metaphysical.
You couldn't imagine shopping at Bullard's.
At least, a person could buy a rose now and again.
So the flower shop for all its salon
was not unapproachable, like Bullard's were.
Every night, the riches were squirreled away in vaults,
like money in a bank.
At closing time, the little squares of the Bullard windows
were emptied.
Next door to Bullard's was Gokey's.
Here, Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway
had ordered their bottes sauvages, the knee
high snakebite resistant boots worn by knowing men of action.
From here, the likewise celebrated
Gokey's Indian dressing was sent around the globe
to those wishing to protect their leather
goods from the dryness of deserts or the rot of jungles.
Gokey's is international, my mother
said with rare earnestness, indicating a step well
beyond downtown.
She never said anything was just like downtown.
To her, a moronic remark.
She considered my aunt a silly woman, though, a good cook.
Well, that's all she does, Leo the lion pronounced.
She never leaves the house.
With all that time on my aunt's hands,
my mother couldn't see why she couldn't
read a book now and again.
Your aunt's not much of a reader,
she said, a final judgment.