Last Thursday as two friends and I loaded the truck for our road trip to a music festival, we paused in front of 60 red roses corralled in a bucket on my friend’s kitchen counter.
“What should I do with these?” she asked. Her 60th birthday had been the day before; the long stems were a gift from her husband. The blooms were open, showing off their unblemished red petals. The scarlet flowers were a vision of floral perfection. They would be dead by the time my friend returned home.
My two friends and I road trip with gusto. We fashion loose plans that give us a crude architecture and some fluid compass points, but our trips have a larky, untethered flavor. The roses almost shimmied in that bucket, asking to get in on the improv. They were too luscious to be left behind. So we scooped half of them into a garbage bag, added an inch of water and wedged them beside the gearshift.
We drove from Flagstaff to Durango, slicing across the reservation and up through Cortez. We didn’t have a plan for the floral giveaway. No rules or outcomes. We relied on our familiar muses of whim and impulse as we began moving in and out of the orbits of strangers.
The young woman in the coffee booth at the edge of Flagstaff. The couple from Barcelona we encountered on the Navajo Nation at a roadside stop. The sidewalk musician in Durango whose eyes teared when a rose was lowered into his open guitar case. The woman in cowboy boots pushing a baby in a stroller. The weathered man sitting outside of a supermarket eating a sandwich who took the rose and asked me to marry him. The checkout woman at the Cortez supermarket. The trio of 30-something Japanese tourists in a Cruise America RV who shot us peace signs as we took turns taking photos of one another. The two women who looked stricken as they reached out to take the flowers and then reached forward to bear hug me. “You don’t know how much I needed something like this today,” one whispered in my ear.
We gave, and no one refused. To some we told the story of the birthday and the road trip. To others we simply approached, handed the rose and walked away.
“Commit a random act of kindness.” “Pay it forward.” I’ve idled at red lights behind car bumpers bearing those stickers. While I admire the premise; the words make me wince. They feel more like cutesy slogans advertising public piety. Was our rose giveaway a random act of kindness? Maybe. But it felt like something else, something that may have been perceived as kind but was not, per se, an act of kindness. Kindness has more calories.
Were we paying it forward? Possibly. But payment suggests settling a tab or squaring off a debt. We weren’t resolving anything or making a deposit into a karmic account, we just wanted to give away some flowers. At least that’s what we said as we began the road trip. But after we handed away the roses and crossed paths with all those strangers, we saw that something else had happened—handing out the roses opened encounters as abbreviated and fleetingly illuminating as the light of a sparkler.
When we began I suppose we fancied ourselves as givers, transmitting the rose from us to them. But we found that we were makers. We made encounters, exchanges, small and shared moments. Roses were our conduit; giving them away was our guise. Our offering was beautiful and benign, nothing that elicited discomfort or a clumsy minuet of refusing and insisting and acquiescing. No one knew our names. There was no subterranean expectation of reciprocation. And everyone responded with some version of joy or gratitude or surprise. Or all three.
By handing out roses, we created social permission to approach strangers and soften the distance between us. We paid attention. We met eyes. When we gave the roses, we created fleeting connections injected with warmth and humanity, moments where armors dropped and delight carbonated the air.
Yeah, we also wanted to create a bit of theatre. And we did. But I think somewhere inside we were living into an idea expressed by a Japanese proverb: “A bit of fragrance clings to the hand that gives the flowers.”
