May 7, 2007
Flower (from the Munich Tales)
FLOWER
By Michael Kroetch
He believed in flow. He believed in goodness. He believed if he rode in a balloon above the city he would be able to see the goodness from there like you could see flowers on a sunny day in the field where he sometimes went running. Goodness was like a flower to him. It was not something permanent, but fleeting. His goal was to try and capture it on a map as it occurred, at least as much of it as he could from his balloon above the city. He had acquired a powerful telescope for just this purpose and found a How to book on the use of telescopes to help him use it as it was meant to be. Or sort of how it was meant to be. He knew he would be looking in the wrong direction for the goodness and that usually telescopes tried to find it in the stars. But he didnīt let this trouble him. He was not the sort to be troubled by what other people thought of him or what he did. Itīs why he didnīt get bothered when his neighbors in the apartment complex all signed a petition against him for his late night noise antics of building the large gondola for his balloon. He used vestiges of things that they had thrown away and which he had squirreled away out of the large trash containers in the courtyard. His place was filled with castoffs: old bicycle tires, pieces of a broken gas stove, several smashed lamps, a torn hammock, some mildewed luggage that seemed to have been half eaten by rats, an ancient stereo system with speakers bigger than his entire closet. All of this and more he was using to fashion the gondola for his balloon. Soon he would have it ready for the launch. He calculated that the best day to track goodness would be in the middle of the week and so heīd chosen Wednesday as the day for his first journey. The problem was he could not get off from his job at the noodle factory on Wednesdays because that was always the day they sent heir biggest shipment off to Spain. He didnīt know what to do. He was afraid of his boss finding out about his mapping plans. He didnīt think his boss would really understand the concept. He knew not everyone was able to think as abstractly about life as he could. But he didnīt want his mapping of goodness to itself somehow involve an act of non-goodness with him lying to his boss and so he decided the only way to make it work out well was to for everyone was to bring his boss along on the journey. Of course for this he would have to reconfigure some aspects of his gondola design and the weight variables of extra ballast heīd need to bring along. But the ballast wouldnīt be too hard to work out, he had the two kitchen sinks heīd saved for just such an unplanned turn of events. He tied them to the side of the big unwieldy odd basket in his kitchen and smiled how nicely surprised his boss would be when he woke up after the sedative wore off and could look down through the telescope and see all the goodness blossoming so far below them.
