For Sunday coffee hour, my friend Liz cut irises from her front yard and brought them to our spot (Victor Allen’s on D’Onofrio) in a heavy clay vase, glazed verdigris.  “I just wanted you to have some flowers,”  she offered, setting them down on the deep orange of the wooden side table between our chairs. The cafe is decorated quite darkly – mohair armchairs the color of clotted blood, deep brown floors, walls no lighter than coffee with a splash of cream.  The irises towered like white clouds in the modest light reflected from the parking lot.  Outside, other customers absorbed the warmth of a June day we’ve waited so long for, filling themselves with a little extra buzz of sunshine.  Liz and the irises and I had the place to ourselves.

Usually, I have the presence of mind to take a picture when I feel that inner clang pointing toward something ordinary and beautiful, but yesterday I had practically no mind at all.  Which, sadly, is just another way of saying I was all mind – bedeviled with thoughts and anxieties so persistent and familiar I have all I can do simply to sit still.  So I missed that moment when the irises took hold of the entire room, perfecting the light and the dark with their own unrestrained becoming.  Taking our cozy seats across from the irises, Liz and I told the events of the week in their presence.  “Oh, don’t they smell wonderful!”  Liz observed, distracted in mid-sentence.  “I can’t really smell them,”  I said, leaning in to see what she meant.  “You can’t?!”  She was astonished.

The irises made it home with me intact,  in a big plastic cup with one of those domed lids meant to protect the whipped cream on your confectionary beverage.  As I compared a few props against them, I caught myself hoping that making a picture would help me feel better.  There’s no kindness in letting this sort of expectation get the upper hand.  “It hurts now,”  I told myself.  “It’ll probably still hurt when I’m done photographing.”    I taped up some backgrounds that I like, and took my spot on the little step stool next to the bright window.  Maybe it was the warmth of the car on the drive home, or the stillness of watching the beckoning layers of petals, but unexpectedly, there it was.  A sharp, juicy-fruit scent, as thick and purple as the irises were white and tender, radiated from them like chimes echoing into summer twilight.

I did stop.  I did drink it in.  I can’t make a picture of it.  You just had to be there.

A friend from grade school posted our 5th grade class picture on Facebook.  In it, I am 9 years old –  a little too young for 5th grade. The explanation is simple:  due to a gross bureaucratic error, the Chicago Public Schools accidentally hired a gifted teacher for our first grade class.  In June of 1972,  22 of her students tested with reading scores too high for 2nd grade.  In September of 1973, nearly our entire class skipped to 3rd grade, and our gifted  teacher was – of course –  laid off, thus restoring the natural order of professional mediocrity to Lincoln School.

Fifth grade was okay.  In Social Studies, we watched a series of perplexing movies about Eskimos.  The boys loved it when the Aleut father carved up raw seal meat and fed it to his children.  Our science teacher – Kasimir Micah – tricked me into inhaling ammonia as an “experiment” in class, leaving me crying and gasping for oxygen.  (He was my first true sadist – I’ve known a few others, two of them teachers.)  We took ballet, and went on sleep-overs, and turned 10 that April.

At the Chicago Park District field house where we went for ballet class, a neglected lilac bush drooped over the landing at the top of the cement stairs.  When Miss Mazur excused her brood of ballerinas for a break, Pammy and Cheryl and I curtsied with the earnest drama of dying swans, and scurried outside to smell The Lilac.  Jostling to reach the closest branches, we scuffed our pink tights and slippers with rust as we leaned against the crumbling painted iron railing, and pulled the curtain of perfume against our noses.   At 10, I conceived The Lilac as belonging completely to me.  I inhaled its scent as if I could become A Lilac, until Miss Mazur would send someone outside to find us.   Dreamy with pleasure, we might spin and leap through the stale dark hallway, back to our barres to turn out our feet and point our toes, trailing gravel and paint chips across the studio floor.

I don’t look that different from the 9 year-old in the 1973-74 Lincoln School class picture.  My face has reclaimed the roundness of a self with little to gain from prettiness, a self who is on the outside of a certain feminine territory where she simply doesn’t belong.  Instead, I crawl beneath branches hanging so low their panicles of flowers tangle in the grass.  I’m sure I look ridiculous, my orthopedic work shoes poking out from under the twigs and leaves, as if a tornado dropped a Lilac Bush on the Witch of Lake Woebegone.  Overhead, birds chatter and swap places between old thick limbs carrying their load of spring treasure as close to the sky as they can.  I pull a cluster of lilacs closer, my whole being permeated with their breath.  I lie there as long as I want, until it is almost too dark to take pictures.  As I walk home, I feel like dancing.

No.  I haven’t really changed that much at all.

Thoughts are swimming like lilacs through my summer dreams
on waves below the current words can’t reach.  I pause to try to say
what happened but only find
a constellation of petals underneath the surface.