Beautiful

“Dance?”

So we slow dance. He lifts his legs high than presses his flat feet on the floor and slightly sways. I’m a half head taller and my chin rests on top of his wild loopy salt-pepper curls. Careful not to lean too forward; I have this awful habit of leaning forward, I follow his sudden dips. “You smell good,” he whispers into my ear. He dips me way back, and I go limp like a rag doll, praying my back doesn’t snap. We dance all night, and then naked, we sit in his hot tub outside in his rose garden. Watching the moon and the clusters of stars spraying the dark, we embrace, our wet hot bodies one. His skin smells of summer damp grass.

“You’re my beautiful butterfly caught in a glass jar,” he whispers. An owl hoots. A firefly lights the dark.

I wake.

The dream was so real, exactly a moment Jack and I had. Is he alive and am I dead? We shared so much beauty together, so many beautiful moments — walks in the rain, dancing to Billie Holiday’s music, walking along the edge of the ocean, collecting rocks and shells, waking with roses from his garden on my pillow-making love, drenched in the morning sun.
So why had I had confronted him that he didn’t call enough? Accused him of having other affairs?

The pandemic persists. Heat waves cover San Francisco and California. Fires surround San Francisco and drop piles of black ash along my window sills, and the streets, like dirty clothes. Homeless people are sprawled in doorways, a huge contrast next to the thirty something start up men and women who wear thousand dollar running shoes, and Lulu Lemon running clothes. Racism is rampant. Ageism is rampant. Police brutality is rampant. America is transitioning to something I don’t know.

It’s early afternoon and San Francisco is sprayed with humid sunlight. I walk up a long crooked hill, breathing hard under my two masks. Thin brown birds, like bouquets, cluster along the edge of puffy moving clouds. A layer of smoke mixed with pink mist drapes the Golden Gate Bridge, like stained jewelry. An hour later, my body damp, my water bottle bouncing against my waist, I arrive at Golden Gate Park’s Japanese Tea Garden. Almost immediately, I feel the surrounding serenity. Under a huge green umbrella tree draping shadows over the rippling pond, I sit at a wood table in the shade, next to Japanese maples, pines, cedars and cypresses. A young Japanese woman in Geisha makeup, wearing a pale ivory satin kimono, gently pours jasmine tea into a heavy black iron cup, and serves a dish of almond cookies.

The garden is beautiful.

What is beauty? It’s not what I had been programmed to think it is. Always, I thought beauty was to look like a movie star: Perfect teeth, hair, a figure. “Beauty will get you everything,” my poor beautiful Mother would say. Ironically, she never looked into her inner self, destroyed all those around her, including herself, and died angry and wounded. Without a true self, beauty goes flat and there is nothing beautiful.

I savor this beautiful moment. I sip the delicious jasmine tea, holding the cup close to my face, and inhaling the perfumed scent. A moment to treasure. I wonder if our beautiful moments are sewn into a life tapestry and threaded in different colors.

The garden is peaceful, and beautiful. Beauty is quiet, not displayed. You have to feel it. Unlike our culture where beauty is sold as necessary for happiness, jobs, romantic love, riches. I think of my friend Moo Moo Milstein; during the pandemic after she sees herself on Zoom, she pays a dermatologist to come to her house for filler, botox, laser treatments. So sad as beauty is felt, seen in a sudden smile, a look of kindness, the sight of a very elderly couple walking slowly, quietly holding hands. Richard Burton paid millions to buy Elizabeth Taylor the Krups diamond, but the beauty isn’t the diamond, it’s his passion. So full of romance. Just as Jack’s garden roses on my pillow, was beautiful. How I spoiled it with confrontation tears that k he wasn’t mognamous.

As a girl, I was in beauty contests that my mother made me enter. But I was too tall, too “Klutzy,” she’d say, and I’d felt self-conscious. Like a poem without emotions underneath beautiful imagery, beauty is like a failed promise. I grew up wishing I looked like Patty Blumberg with her perfect gold color silky hair, not limp brown and frizzy like mine, and her perfect even teeth, not buck like mine, and her long slim limbs like stems on a flower, not thick and pale and freckled like mine. Her ballerina flat breasts were graceful, and not large like mine. Even in grammar school, the boys called me tits, or water jugs. Even now, at 84, my cross over purse has to be worn on the side, or the strap accentuates my large breasts.

A clap of thunder. A streak of blue lightening. Time to go. I pay my bill, and begin my walk home, walking fast. In my pocket is a packet of jasmine tea that I bought. I will have it when evening comes. When I begin my reading.

Along the way, I pass an almost hidden, lovely small florist shop. The door is open and I watch a handsome older Japanese man placing magnificent orchids inside two tall refrigerators. He wears a mask. I am struck by his long gentle fingers, and the loving way he touches the plants. He notices me watching. “Come in,” he says.

I step inside the cool entrance. Silently, in awe of the beauty, I watch him gently choose certain plants and then place them into the refrigerators.

“So beautiful. They look so alive, as if from another world.

He wears a mask but his eyes smile. “They are.”

Gently, he holds the most beautiful gardenia plant I’ve ever seen. The petals open like ball gowns, and even under my mask I smell the sweet scent. He explains that the jasmine seeds of this white gardenia is very special and from Hawaii. In his lilting accent he explains its’ origins, and we discuss the beauty of gardenias.

“All flowers and plants, even the sticky ugly ones are beautiful. They hear you. They see you. They feel you. They intuit you.” He has had his shop for forty years. He specialized in weddings, and romance. He flew around the world and handpicked his flowers. “For beautiful moments,” he says, wistfully.

A light rain begins. I must go, I say. He places the jasmine gardenia plant inside a basket with a handle. “For you,” he says.

“Oh, I … I…I It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

He bows and returns to his plants.

At home I place the plant on the small antique table near the window. The gardenia’s scent fills my studio apartment.

Beautiful.

BarbaraRoseBrooker is an author/journalist/age activist. Her latest novel Love, Sometimes, published Feb 2020, Post Hill Press/ Simon Schuster is available at all bookstores and at Amazon. She is working on a book of short stories pre and post Covid. Her weekly podcasts The Rant, and her TV appearances are on www.barbararosebrooker.com