What's Common

I know the fuchsia flowers in the Community Gardens, their outrageous color -- a celebratory scream of life.  I know their uplifted blossoms, their fragile stems.  I know the way they crumple, folding like carelessly discarded scarves.  I know the pleasures they afford for butterflies, bees, and me.

This year, though, they fill me with sadness, not glee.  In their glorious unfolding and folding, I think of Charley in college, at the peak of his strength onstage and off, and now as his strength ebbs, racing out into a great sea of suffering and death.

May he become part of the red sunset on the Frio River wall he sees from his porch, the pulse of a Texas spring, the blue flame of a bluebell, the fodder for some one glorious thing that pushes up in spring.

It is as Gertrude says, "common; all that lives must die."  

But it is also, "particular" with me.  

May he bloom forever in memory.