Red roses symbolize true love. When I was a boy, my grandfather grew them for my grandmother to show her his love for her. He also grew red carnations which symbolize love, affection, and devotion.
My mother grew red geraniums. They symbolize health and happiness. They also symbolize foolishness, lack of good sense or judgment. My mother grew cacti too.
Wild roses grew in the hedgerows at the edge of the Great Common and near our front gate. The cottage in which we lived was called Rosecott due to the abundance of wild roses growing near the cottage. I do not remember how long we lived at Rosecott but the happiest memories of my childhood come from that time.
My family emigrated to the United States when I was ten years old. My mother’s younger sister, my aunt, lived in the United States with her husband and her son.
Both my mother and my aunt had married GIs stationed in England. My mother’s marriage was not as happy as her younger sister’s. She was the victim of domestic violence and with the help of my aunt returned to England, my older brother in tow and pregnant with me.
My mother never talked about my father. What I did learn was he beat her with a board with a nail in it and he kept her locked in the house. He had planned to send my older brother and I to military school when we were old enough—a plan that my mother did not support. I was born in England where her parents lived.
My grandparents wanted to be reunited with their youngest daughter and my mother with her sister. My mother thought that my older brother and I would have a better chance of entering university in the States.
I have only a few memories from the early childhood—peeking through the curtains at night and seeing a piebald rat outside the window; visiting the Millers’ farm with its wheat fields, kittens, Pekinese dog, and domed clock; living in a council house with a red door; riding in an ambulance with my grandmother who had broken her leg; following my older brother and a friend and becoming lost, drinking milk and eating biscuits (cookies) at the police station, and riding home in a black police car; playing with empty ammunition boxes and climbing a cargo net in the school playground; tripping while running a race at school when someone threw their cap in front of my feet; going to someone’s birthday party; going to movie theater and seeing a part of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
We left before the end of the movie. It terrified me. Except for the Miller’s Pekinese, I was also terrified of dogs when I was a small boy.
I was scared of a lot of things, including BBC children’s programs—the ones in which a rocket ship landed on a planet covered with skulls and bones and the listener could hear the skulls and bones crunching under the rocket crew’s feet; the narrator who traveled back in time and was chased by a T-Rex.
I had a very active imagination. If I found a broadcast too frightening, I would run out of the room. The old woman into whom the wicked stepmother had turned herself to poison Snow White haunted my dreams.
When my grandfather retired, we moved to Suffolk, to the cottage on the edge of the Great Common in the village of Ilketshall St. Andrew. It was three miles from the town of Bungay and three miles from the town of Beccles. We did our shopping in Bungay and we also shopped in Beccles.
The cottage had an apple orchard, plum trees, and two large fields. We had a Jersey cow, chickens, and geese in a pound on the common. We also raised pigs. We grew our own vegetables and made our own butter and cheese. It was not exactly an idyllic life, but I was happier there than where I had lived before.
The years following my family’s move to the United States were some of the loneliest years of my life. The move was traumatic for me. I lost my friends and my dog.
We lived with my aunt for a year and then in a house which belonged to her and her husband across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.
At the two schools I attended, I was not accepted by the other children. I had not lived in the area all of my life. I did not speak like they did. I did not know their games. I was a misfit.
I acted out my unhappiness by stealing pocket money from my classmates who had left it in their desk, eating donuts and iced sweet rolls for lunch, and shoplifting cologne bottle caps from a drugstore and small toys from a five and dime store. To make matters worse I broke my front tooth skating in front of a dentist’s office and stuck my ankle through the front wheel of a bicycle while riding it at a hgh speed. .
My grandfather and my mother would buy two acres north of New Orleans across Lake Pontchartrain and my grandfather would build a house on the property.
The boys at my new school bullied me and the girls teased me. One boy broke my nose. I stopped riding the school bus because one boy kept picking on me.
I did make some friends in high school. By then, however, I had come to feel like I was the odd man out when it came to friendships. In junior high school I was the last man picked for games. I also felt like I was the third wheel. I was not necessary to the group and was tagging along.
I also made some friends in university. I liked one young woman, but she saw me only as a friend. It was hard when she showed interest in my friends but not in me. It was not exactly rejection. She was simply oblivious to my feelings.
She was surprised when I admitted to having feelings for her. By then I had finished university and had been drafted. She was unable to return my feelings, having become emotionally involved with a mutual friend.
I began basic training, depressed and unhappy with life. I called her a couple of times from basic training, but I learned from a mutual friend that the calls were upsetting her. Her parents asked me to stop calling their house.
After I was discharged from the air force, I went back to university. Her father who was a professor invited me to the house, but I could not bring myself to go.
After two more years of university, I went to work, first as substance abuse counselor, then as a non-public assistance food stamp eligibility worker, a foster care worker, and finally as a family services case worker. During that time, I lost contact with my university friends except for one couple. I socialized with my co-workers.
While I was a food stamp eligibility worker, I dated one of my co-workers. I would discover that she was dating me to make a boyfriend who was not showing her enough attention jealous. By then I had developed feelings for her and her getting back together with the boyfriend was traumatic. I became quite depressed.
She would go to social work school, and I would transfer to child welfare, accepting a position as a foster care worker. I was on a track to become a supervisor in the food stamp program, but I could no longer work in that office due to the unhappy associations that I had with it.
Except for a high school friend with whom I played tennis and a young woman from Florida with whom I worked and sometimes ate lunch most of my social contacts were with members of my family and my church for the next few years.
My high school friend committed suicide. She had attempted suicide in the past. She went to a party where the other partygoers on learning that she had suicidal tendencies encouraged her to kill herself. She went home and took an overdose of pills. When the pills did not kill her, she shot herself in the chest. She died from the gunshot wound.
Having reconciled with her mother with whom she had in the past had a bad relationship, the young woman from Florida went back to Florida.
Several years ago, I jokingly told a woman who I knew at church, that if I was younger, I would marry her in an instant. It was intended as a compliment, but she misunderstood me and took it as a serious marriage proposal. She turned me down.
What hurt most about the rebuff was not the rejection of the proposal, which was not a serious one. Rather it was her telling me that she only thought of me as a casual acquaintance when I had been led to believe that we were friends.
She subsequently moved from the area and none of the friends whom she made here have heard from her since. She had talked about putting her life here behind her and starting a new life. Cutting her ties with friends may have been part of it.
Where do the red roses come in. Those who find true love should count themselves blessed.
I am not talking about temporary “love,” the kind that is driven by hormones and fades as the effects of the hormones fade. I am talking about the kind of love in which we develop strong emotional attachment to someone, and in which having come to know the good and bad of them, we love them still the same.
I believe that is the kind of love my grandparents had for each other. The red roses and the red carnations were my grandfather’s way of telling my grandmother, “I love you.”
My grandfather missed my grandmother so much after she died that he survived her by barely a year. He wanted to be with her.
