I love them, I love them not

by Paul Kandarian

April showers bring May flowers. If only I knew which was which.

Look, I’ll admit it: I’m not a flower guy, or flowery, but let’s stick to the literal for now.

Flowers are like cars to me; I really can’t tell one from another unless they’re really different, like telling a VW Beetle from a Rolls Royce. That much I can get, though I can’t afford either. When someone asks what kind of car I like, I shrug and say, “Blue?”

Flowers are the same.

I mean, I know roses… I think. And maybe daisies. I say maybe, because I think there’s another breed or species or kind or whatever that sorta looks like that.

Sunflowers are easy because they’re freaking huge, and beautiful, and towering over me when they’re fully bloomed like they’re going to eat me like the man-eating Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors. Now another I should know are hydrangeas, because we have them in the yard – my lady loves hydrangeas. But every time I try to remember what they are I say “chrysanthemum,” and I’m so proud of myself, not for being wrong but for spelling “chrysanthemum” correctly on the first try despite never having written the word out before until just now. Yay, me! Give that man some flowers! But the other morning, I took a picture of flowers in a vase my lady put out, which were catching the early day rays just beautifully, illuminating the looping, velvety petals and also the anthem, the filament, the overall pistil, three words that identify flower bits that I had no idea existed until I just now looked them up (quick defensive reminder: I can spell “chrysanthemum”).

So I posted it because it was so lovely and I said I thought it was a tulip and then the botanical wrath of the gods came crashing down upon me which may be overstating it but not really because it was from my Italian cousin whose wrath-crashing abilities are second to none.

My daughter had pointed out that it was a lily, NOT a tulip, at which point my tarttongued cousin chimed in with “Your daughter’s right, numb nuts, it’s a lily.” I mean, c’mon, is there a need to know? I hike a lot and have an app on my phone to identify plants, because I like foraging for edibles and don’t want to die eating pretty, poisonous things. I eat dandelions, for example, a flower even I can identify because they were all over my yard when I was a kid and my Italian aunt who always wore black because her husband died like 100 years before, would come over and dig them up to make salad or wine or offer to the gods – who knows.

But I love dandelions. I eat the flower, the stem, the greens and as I choke down the bitter blend I remind myself that dandelions are high in nutrients and vitamins, as well as a significant gag factor that I force myself to overlook.

But this app is amazing. I can take pictures of a tree trunk and it tells me what tree it is. I snap flowers or leaves or berries and boom, the name pops up on my phone. So really, do I need to know the names of flowers off the top of my male head? I think not.

That’s why the god of apps created it.

And speaking of my male head, maybe it's the whole men-are-fromMars-women-are-from Venus thing – if I have my planet-metaphors aligned correctly – but what is the female fascination with foresting every possible inch of couch and chair and bed with as many pillows as they possibly can?

Seriously, you have a perfectly good threehuman couch but stack pillows on either end like puffy books on a shelf and leave maybe room for one skinny-butted person to wedge themselves in the middle. Worse are bed pillows, like in hotels, where when you get to your room you wonder where they hid the bed until you see it buried like the ancient city of Atlantis under a veritable sea of pillows.

More confusing still: many hotels have “pillow menus,” which would make sense if you ate them but not for just sleeping on. But hey, there usually are so many you can get a quick highintensity pre-sleep workout by having to de-pillow the bed before you can get in it. And okay, if couch or chair decorations like that are technically called "throw pillows," why do women get upset when you throw them on the floor to sit on the couch because you can't when the furniture is like a fully loaded aircraft carrier for pillows?! There must be some explanation even for a man like me, with a brain as soft a – yup, a pillow – and the velvety petals of a tulip… or do I mean lily?

But hey, at least I can spell chrysanthemum. Yay me! Give the man some flowers!