Delivering the luv

Valentine’s Day has never been a thing to me. I mean as a kid it was the day you got to make, fill out, give, and receive cute paper declarations of love. “I choo-choo-choose you” and other such whimsical nonsense. And of course there was Valentine’s Day candy involved. If you want to win me over, come bearing candy. I’ll be putty in your hands.

As you get older Valentine’s Day tends to go one of three ways: mushy, bitter, or indifferent. The mushies get all excited over Valentine’s Day. Maybe you could classify these folks as those with significant others, but some people just love the idea of love. The bitters get nauseous at thought of all the hearts, teddy bears, and corny couplets that come with Feb 14. These are usually the people that don’t have significant others on the big day. Or maybe those folks that never got candy grams or a carnation in high school. The bitters usually mock the mushies. To the indifferents, V day is just another day on the calendar.

I fall in the indifferent category. I think we should love each other every day and that a particular day designated as a love fest is kind of forced and pointless. A “hallmark holiday” that’s been a bit inflated to push merchandise on us all. I surely wouldn’t mind receiving some flowers or candy on that day, but I’m not going to go out of my way to get involved in the V day hype. I would never push it on my man. I also wouldn’t go so far as to feel dejected should the absence of flowers, candy, or general love accolades greet me on the big day. People that choose to show each other love on the big day shouldn’t be the butt of jokes. Showing love should never be put down.

For me…Valentine’s Day means work.

For longer than I can recall, my family has delivered flowers on Valentine’s Day. A family friend owns a flower shop in our neighborhood and we are part of the florist army reserves. We are called to duty on such important flower days as Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and sometimes Christmas. We drive around in circles making sure that special someone knows you care. It’s fun.

I love driving. At times I can tire from driving too much, but mostly I love it. Probably a reason I like driving so much now is that I don’t own a car, so it’s kind of a novelty. But even when I did own a car I loved driving. Driving in South Africa wears me out because it’s like a constant obstacle course and you need to be steady on point. Depending on where you are driving, the road could contain any of the following: ladies carrying bundles of firewood on their head, cows, goats, donkeys, kids, bicycles, potholes, dangerous mountain curves, erratic taxi drivers, misleading or absent street signs. I have decided that if you can drive in a busy township (rural or urban) you can drive just about anywhere. ‘kasi drivers are ready for anything driving has to throw at you…even Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. My secret blue collar dream jobs are in no particular order: taxi driver (SA or USA), city bus driver, or semi truck driver. I can’t say I’d want to do any of those my whole life, but I sure wouldn’t mind a stint in any of those positions.

The joy I get from getting paid to drive around and listen to killer tunes on the special flower days is only added to by the fact that I make people happy. No one is ever upset when you show up on their porch or at their workplace in your red and pink V day outfit (complete with dancing top hat teddy bear heart pin) with flowers in hand. It’s really nice to be able to bring a smile and a fragrant bouquet to someone when you had nothing to do with the thought or sentiment involved. You just delivered the goods.

Delivering flowers to businesses is particularly hilarious because as you enter the office all the ladies’ puff up a bit and turn heads to follow the flowers, each one hoping it is for them, until you reach your target. Then each person not receiving flowers deflates a bit and gets back to work or ooooohs and aaaahs over the flowers, probably vowing to drop some hints at home about how nice Delia’s flowers looked at work. My brother and I also think that some of these ladies are secretly cursing the woman who got the flowers. We make up fake curses after we leave the office. Hilarious. And the best part is that you get to leave the politics, get in your car, turn up the tunes, and drive away.

For me, and especially in the last years I’ve been doing this, delivering flowers is a way to reacquaint myself with the layout of my town and the surrounding area. It’s really cool to be able to drive around and relearn the diversity of all the nooks and crannies that we call Waukegan. The downtown old school mansions, projects, suburban dwellings, parks, taquerias, sexy cake bakery, The Smoke n Gun (a tobacco and firearms store), the love house (a house we delivered to that served as a monument to Cupid), the house that always has Mary, Joseph, and the Easter Bunny in their nativity scene, a homemade ice rink on someone’s lawn, the houses of old friends, and all that’s in between. I must say we got a mighty fine town going on up here in Waukegan.

The florist delivers to all of Lake County, so that means not just my town, but also many towns in the area. I have spent about 16 years of my life with Waukegan as my home base. The general framework of the lay of the land always sticks in my mind, but I’ve been away for so long that the fine details often get muddled. Names, faces, and places swirl around my head in one big geographical soup. I recognize the names of many streets, but getting there can sometimes be a Herculean effort. Thank goodness for phonebook maps, Mapquest, Rand Mcnally.com, and my brother the navigator. Unfortunately this little detail makes me a slightly ineffectual driver and I often end up getting flustered driving back and forth and around where a more familiar driver could knock off all the targets in smooth fashion without all the backtracking. But in the end I get there and so do your flowers.

The places I despise when I deliver flowers are those crazy suburban subdivisions that seem to pop up in empty fields like weeds in your garden. I curse every time I know I need to venture into one to bring Valentine’s Day love to your door. There are a number of ideological beefs I have with these planned communities, but mostly they annoy me because I always get lost in them. All the ticky tack houses look the same and the streets curve around each other like a plate of spaghetti with no rhyme or reason for where they go. Streets quickly end or curve into new streets. There are myriad Circles that dead end. The names of the streets are pretentious. In my nightmares Banshee Whisper Ridge Court, Tiger Tail Circle, Pond Ridge Creek Boulevard are a tangle of streets I never seem to be able to find an exit from. In waking life the scene is not much different. From the airplane I always picture the subdivision street swirls as malicious anacondas choking the life out our landscape. From the ground they choke the life out of my sense of direction. Pave paradise and put up a parking lot, right?

Because we are sometimes on a tight time schedule or want to get as many deliveries in as possible (to maximize profit) it also means that you can get a little crazy with the car. I’m not talking about OJ Simpson freeway stunts, but you do get to bend the rules of driving a bit. I don’t usually speed much while out on deliveries unless I’m really in a hurry. What I’m talking about is ruthless parking. I’ve always been a renegade parker. I find it sneaky to park in a metered space for 5 minutes without feeding the meter your coins. I got other tricks up my sleeve when it comes to parking, but I’m not telling…sorry. When we deliver we have a sign that says “Delivery in progress. Driver will return soon.” To me that says we get to park in fire lanes, handicap spots, and anywhere else we can stash the car for the 2 minutes we will be inside. I love this. Being in South Africa has taught me the beauty of not following the rules all the time. In the USA we follow the rules because they are there. While I do think this makes for a more upstanding society, at times it means that we just follow because. We follow without thinking and I find a problem with this. In South Africa you have the opposite extreme…damn near lawlessness at times. While this is not an optimal situation, and I believe SA could use some more followers, I like this situation because it is created by more free thinking people. Or maybe just downright rude people, but I prefer to think of the former and not the later. I like to mix up the two societies in my approach to things. Ruthless parking gives me my fix. I have to say my best moment this V day was smoking a cigarette next to a no smoking sign all while parked in a handicap spot while I waited for my brother to deliver a bouquet. I was on fire for those 2 minutes!

One final nice thing I enjoyed this V day was working with my brother. He came up from his town to make some extra cash. At first we were in separate vehicles, but we realized that it made sense to work together. Although we probably made less money (because we split the money we get paid for each delivery), we got to have fun driving around together. I guess I’ll always choose laughter over money. We were a well oiled machine with me at the steering wheel and him at the map pointing out how to get out of those awful suburban subdivisions and walking the flowers to the door. A dynamic duo indeed.

Hope you enjoyed the flowers, candy, and love fest of Valentine’s Day 2009. I’ll see you again on Mother’s Day…

Until then…keep the faith and spread it gently

Love Lynsee