Articles

A Sense of Red Petals and Snowfall

Neely Tucker, Free Press Staff Writer - February 25, 1990

When the heavy snows fell this month, making the red roses and carnations of street vendors seem a deeper shade than the store-bought variety, I bought the next to last rose from the man in the rusty wool cap at the corner of Beaubien and Monroe.

It was very late. I do not know the time, only that it was after 11, for the People Mover had shut down for the night.

This left me little alternative but to shuffle through the snow from the office to my Greektown apartment. The day had begun pleasantly enough, so I had set out in the morning in a pair of worn sneakers.

But that night, after two blocks in the snow, I discovered the left shoe had a thin rip along the inside sole, which prompted me to walk on the outside of that foot. This resulted in a curious, left-foot-good-foot gait, and the tracks in the snow looked as if a meandering, peg-legged cripple had passed by.

And still the snow fell.

The rose man was closing up shop. He is there most every night, and when I pass him on my evening jog, he sometimes sings out the "Rocky" theme. So I stop and talk to him often. And tonight he was a warm face at the end of a series of frozen, deserted streets.

The weather had killed what should have been a good day for him, he said; he had planned to sell another cart full of flowers. Instead, he still had two roses left in his first batch. Each was wrapped in plastic, with a thin trickle of baby's breath.

"One," I said.

"Two for same price, plus a discount for Rocky," he said, slipping them into my hand. "Two dollars. For girlfriend?"

I paid him and smiled. "No girlfriend. Maybe by spring."

Greektown was unusually quiet, my neighbors already asleep by the time I climbed the stairs. I had no idea why I had bought the roses; a senseless gesture by a failed romanticist. I had no use for them, and, I discovered, no vase. So I rescued a whiskey bottle from the trash, ran it half-full of tap water, and presto! A kitchen table centerpiece.

I ate dinner by candlelight, the rest of the loft lit by the orange glow of the halogen street lamps outside, reflecting the falling snow. It was an eerie evening, looking back now, and my state of mind somewhat melancholy, but at the time it seemed only peacefully hushed. Sipping hot tea, I walked to the windows -- the place was originally a warehouse, with those great, huge windows -- and plopped onto the ledge.

The parking lot below was deserted. Only two cars remained. St. Andrew's Hall, a night club, appeared quiet. The lights in the Old Detroit bar were dark. The streetlights played green and red for no one, looking like Christmas decorations sadly out of season. Two paper bags skipped across Fort Street and, caught in a whirlwind, circled and stalked one another across the parking lot.

It would be a very long time before the streets would be clear again. The pure whiteness of this hour would wear into days and days of drudgery and gray skies and heavy winds, when the soul seems a lifeless, dormant thing, and one longs for a glimpse of spring.

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window," James Joyce wrote at the conclusion of "The Dead." "It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. . . . The snow lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Reciting the rhythms of that last sentence, I was concluding Joyce must have written those lines on a night similar to this when the couple walked around the Beaubien corner of the Old Detroit. I cannot imagine where they could have been at that hour. Waiters, on their way home? Bartenders? Musicians? I had no idea. She was wearing a khaki trench coat, open-toed shoes and a dress that flitted from beneath the coat. She had very short, dark hair and wore no cap. She ran across the street. His hair was black and blown all to hell. He wore a red and blue ski jacket, jeans, and walked instead of ran.

Theirs was one of those last two cars in the lot. A small red something. When he got to the door, and considered the deep unbroken snow over the windshield and roof, and how long it would take to clear the mess, he threw his arms out and whap! Right onto his back, right into the snow. He fanned his arms and legs like a madman.

She ran around the car, looked down at him, and broke out in laughter I could hear so many floors above. Plop! She fell backwards beside him.

Snow angels. They were making snow angels.

Snow angels in my parking lot at 3 a.m. "I'm an AIRPLANE!!" he shouted, flapping his arms even faster, and she laughed even harder. The fresh snow made it easy. They got up, stepped back, and surveyed their handiwork. They were quite good snow angels, actually. Very clear, very clean.

I applauded, behind the glass.

They did not kiss then, as I thought they certainly would. They only slapped snow off each other, still chattering, and set to work on the car. They pulled out of the lot a few minutes later, running the red light.

And I envied them, for being so alive at an hour when most of us are so dead. When we only want the dim hours to pass, so concerned with our sleep, so concerned with the daylight trivialities to come, and not at all with creating a perfect snow angel with a lover in a deserted parking lot at 3 a.m.

I sat there a very long time, listening to nothing, hearing everything, before I finally lapsed into sleep. And in that sleep, I dreamed I opened my eyes again. Now, in my parking lot and all across the city's snowy streets, I saw a hundred, no, a thousand snow angels on the ground, frozen angels who laughed and stole my roses and threw them, petal by petal, into the air, leaving them as bright red clues to the living as to what life could really be.