Yesterday was Valentine's Day. I am the daughter of a florist. Yesterday was Valentine's Day and I was the daughter of a florist who was not busy. Yesterday I delivered flowers to people who had ordered them from my father for Valentine's Day, which turned out to be a tragically slow day for us. Yesterday was Valentine's Day and my father was a florist who was not busy.
On Valentine's Day, florists are supposed to be busy, they expect it. Successful florists also usually have a shop where people can just walk in and pick things out, or they advertise themselves a little bit, or something happens (I'm not in small business or marketing, how am I to know?). For Valentine's Day, florists stock their coolers with lovely things to make arrangements with- which, in the nature of flowers, do not last for weeks and weeks. To be hopeful, florists may stock a full cooler. Yesterday was Valentine's Day, and my father's cooler is still half full. At first the problem was the phone wasn't working. Much like Strongbad's email reply to Silent J about his favorite techno song,
the system was down. To make a bad situation worse, my mother started freaking out and embraced negativity. I was surrounded by it thinking, businesses do not run themselves, people don't magically find out about you.
Here's the history. My dad's been a florist for years, it's safe to say decades. He has worked for other people all of that time, and most recently was the manager of the flower shop that was part of McEwen funeral home downtown. Well, those kind Funeral home people decided that the flower shop was not something that was all that profitable for them, and packed up and moved about a year and a half ago without taking the flower shop with them. All of a sudden, my father was no longer employed. Flowers are all he knows. My daddy is a wonderful man, but he cannot go very far from his box. He is an innocent, and it seems as the years go by he becomes more of an innocent. He has no clue how to run a business. He lacks the killer instinct. My mother pretends to know about it, but she is just as clueless and infinitely more of a worrier. I felt so much frustration at their pain yesterday, the dread that set in, and the quick drain of hope as the phone continued to be silent, even though they knew it had been fixed.
The tragic thing is, my father is a very good florist. I think people probably expect me to be partial, but I am infinitely picky about the way things look and must be presented, and my father has a gift and a true eye for balance and colors and display. In a room full of other florist's work, it's easy for most people to spot what my father has created because they're well put together. When money is tight, though, these silly luxuries such as flowers are some of the first things to be removed from people's things to get themselves. Flowers are impractical. They are fragile and expensive. I wish I could be more into the idea that people should give him business, but I understand that few can afford it. I need to make a website for his business, which means first of all I need to learn how to do it. If I could just give up my job and work for my dad until the business was on it's feet, I would. I just can't afford to be a dreamer.
Le sigh.
The flowers that did go out yesterday and Friday were beautiful, and people loved them.
