Is there hope for an overbearing flag?
Why you should avoid people on cocaine, the power of wildflowers, and how I got to California the first time
Hello friends,
Do you know someone who’s overbearing? The kind of person who takes up too much space, making you feel no taller than your shoes? Perhaps we all have that person inside us, sometimes. I learned at a young age that certain drugs bring it on.
When gathering items for the bag, I looked for images that were hopeful, funny, and provoked a wisdom teaching. Today’s bag reject did no such thing. In fact, this bright image might be one of the darkest of the series, because it reminds me of one of the darkest periods of my life.
The Fun Factory flag design above was inspired by California poppies. Taking it out in April, the height of wildflower season, I sought to pair it with wildflowers. In this shot, the flag was an overbearing backdrop that made the wildflowers look puny.
Puny is how I often felt in 1984-1985, the year Papa developed a cocaine habit. It was a year that many people developed cocaine habits. In my memoir, my 13-year-old narrator writes,
When people come over and he snorts the white stuff through the straws he steals from the movie theater, he talks and talks and gets so big he fills the room and then the whole house, down to the basement, through the rock, and probably all the way to China while Cheryl disappears into her gray self, so much a shadow I’m not sure she’s even there or where she goes because there is no other place to go besides the basement which means she would have to go outside and I would hear the door. I know she’s not in their bedroom because there is only a thin wall and a curtain dividing their room from mine and the stairs creak when someone goes up or down.
Selling the wrong things to the wrong person
Papa was a salesman. If he liked something, he thought he could get more of it by becoming a dealer—whether it was gemstones, birdhouses, gold jewelry, pot, or cocaine. In the autumn of 1985, he arranged a “big business deal” that was going to make us rich. But he didn’t want me and my mother around when he made the deal, so we drove out to California in our motorhome, and then he flew back and made a deal with a DEA agent in a hotel room in White River Junction, Vermont that landed him in jail. My narrator writes from California,
We drove out here so fast, sleeping in truck stops and rest areas the whole way, that for two days whenever I closed my eyes I saw headlights. The silent orchards near Pat and Marian’s place echoed loud in my motor-accustomed ears, the same ears that shut out Papa’s incessant talking, Cheryl’s whining, and their fighting. I spent most of the six-day drive looking out the back window, watching the East dissolve as we rushed toward the promised land of gold and riches.
That’s how I came to California the first time. Like many children of addicts, I learned how to navigate a tenuous reality, trying to find when I could make my presence known and when I needed to copy my mother and make myself gray, invisible, a shadow of a child who hid in books, obsessively arranged a sticker collection, and pounded the dirt roads of Sebastopol orchards on 3-mile solo runs. I learned how to simultaneously love someone and hate them for doing something so stupid.
After living in our motorhome for six weeks by myself at Pat & Marian’s in Sebastopol, I got on a plane for the first time and went back to our makeshift house and its outhouse in Benton, New Hampshire.
Wildflowers can only be wildflowers
Wildflowers appear delicate compared to garden flowers that have had centuries of breeding. Bigger, bolder blooms are interventions. The poppy-inspired flag appears on the card with the wildflowers like an injection of cocaine.
The times we spend under an overbearing person’s influence or in a tightly constrained system concentrate our energy, like the efficient, hardy blooms of wildflowers. What gets us through those times is a vision of what we’ll be when we get out—free. What we don’t know is how it will come to an end, or how we will be changed by the experience.
I experienced a similar situation at a job with an overbearing manager; they were the kind of person with whom you can’t get a word in edgewise, who volleys you with projections about the merits or flaws in your work, and who makes you want to quit.
It is not so easy for children to quit their parents. It is not so easy for families to untangle, as the fallen logs on the card reminded me. Papa got off the cocaine and our family unraveled three years later. My mother Cheryl filled in the gray when she fought against Papa to keep me in high school; he wanted to take me out so we could travel. Cheryl and I were the pair of hardy wildflowers that Papa and his addictions couldn’t cut down.
Perhaps Papa was a wildflower too. Like so many addicts who go untreated, he spent the rest of his life in a haze of booze and pot. It was the cocaine that made him unbearably overbearing. Even though he stopped using it, the drug caused unrepairable damage to our family.
Or was it really damage? The promise of a windfall from the deal got me to California—right where I wanted to be—and I have not stopped coming back.
Water is all you need for a superbloom
This past winter’s heavy rainfall sparked a wildflower superbloom that lasted all summer. Water from the sky is all wildflowers need to achieve large, copious blooms. If only everyone believed that they too could wait for the right moment—when the conditions were right—to bloom into their most resplendent natural forms, they wouldn’t need drugs like cocaine. No one would need to spend inordinate amounts of time, money, and mental energy trying to puff themselves up to make something happen that is simply not ready to—or going to—happen.
I take great solace in this quote from Matt Kahn,
That which is meant to be can never be avoided.
That which is not meant to be can never be conjured.
There was never meant to be an overbearing flag in the bag! Wildflowers are so hardy that they are meant to bloom even in drought years—and there are better photographs in which the flag and wildflowers complement each other.
May you conjure up a few smiles, belly laughs, and heartfelt hugs this week—and know they were meant to be.
May the elements of your life complement each other in perfect harmony.
Love, Lee Ann
Thanks for sharing all of this.