The novels of Charles Dickens are so beloved around the world that there are clubs which meet regularly to discuss his works. Currently, there are a whopping thirty-eight Dickens clubs throughout England and the United States, with fourteen more in Europe, Canada, and Asia. They comprise the World Dickens Fellowship.
Because Dickens’ favorite flower was the geranium, it has become the symbol of all the branches and is prominently displayed by fellowship members as cheery lapel pins at annual Dickens conventions. And geraniums certainly bloom throughout Dickens’ novels: when brides walk down Dickens’ aisles, they carry geraniums; when bodies are displayed at his funerals, they’re buried with geraniums. I suspect Dickens was as hopeless as I am at identifying flowers, so once the geranium got stuck in his cranium, he had his one floral image that he could plant in almost all of his novels.
My own flower of choice since childhood has been the daisy. Growing up, I saw it everywhere: bordering my mom’s garden, in parks, and growing wild in meadows. In elementary school art class, we learned how to pierce the stem of one daisy and thread the stem of the next through it, repeating the process until it became a fun daisy-chain garland.
My fingers were too clumsy and my bouncy-castle mind was too impatient to do a good job of making them, but I fell in love with the flower when the art teacher told us that its name meant “the eye of the day” and was originally pronounced “Day’s-Eye” because it opens at dawn and closes at dusk, tracking the sun with its little yellow eye. Because they close at night, daisies revive stunningly in the morning, looking as fresh as… well, you know…
It was at about this same time in music class that we were forced to croon “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do.” Again, I had no more talent for singing than for garland- making, but my ears certainly perked up when the teacher told us that the song was heavily promoted by Schwinn in the mid-1890’s to popularize their romantic new “bicycles built for two.” I was a C student in art and music, but I was A+ in literature classes because I was addicted to story-telling and stories like these, and my infatuation continues unabated.
I might have assumed my love of daisies originated from those stories of day’s eyes and the romance of tandem bikes built for Daisy and her beau. But now I know better. I loved daisies before I had even seen one. I came to this revelation when a pre-school memory leapt out and reminded me of my first introduction to them.
That epiphany occurred when I was a pre-teen. A neighbor had brought over her toddler for Mom and me to watch while she ran a morning’s worth of errands. The little boy hadn’t been walking long, and so he required Mom or me to occasionally scoop him up after he’d wobbled and toppled over, rear-ending himself onto our den rug.
Here it is more than sixty years later, but I still remember that when he fell for the first time, my mother hurried over and, when lifting him, exclaimed in her merriest sing-song tone, “Upsie-Daisy!” I burst out laughing, as her happy chant made me flash back to my own “tushy” (the wonderful childish Yiddish word for ‘rear-end’) being on the floor, and Mom scooping me up with the same comforting cry. Even today, it remains my first memory, and it convinces me that my love of daisies “stems” from this event, long before I’d ever even seen one.
I used to wonder why that particular moment would provide my earliest memory, but I don’t now. I think it’s because a parent’s doting act of picking their child up after a fall bestows upon that toddler such a strong feeling of love and security that it sets the gold standard of what we all search for in our intimate relationships for the rest of our lives. No life is so easy that it isn’t a series of “Upsie-“ “Oopsie-“ and “Whoopsie-Daisies.” One secret to happiness is finding those precious ones who, when we stumble again and again, are always there joyfully reassuring us, their acts of love forming a beautiful daisy-chain of devotion for us to wear gratefully around our hearts.
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here