Picking Flowers

Most people would agree that parenting is defined in the large crimes of a child; I would disagree. Now, sure it takes great parenting to deal with the times you find pot in a ziplock bag under her pillow, or a Playboy magazine under his bed, but these moments might never come if you are a champion parent in the small crimes. My dad taught me this lesson one Sunday in early April.
I was nine or ten, a kid. We lived in a town called Apple Valley, my dad was the pastor of a small Baptist church. You’re probably picturing some town in Vermont with hills filled with the scent of freshly grown apples as a cool wind blows north from the orchard. You would be wrong. The name Apple Valley is a lie. Located in California’s Mojave Desert, probably the only Apple tree in Apple Valley was grown by an eighty-something lady in her last years. The San Gabriel mountains separated us from the palm trees and beaches of Southern California; we were the nowhere outside of somewhere. Instead of wooded hills we had fields of dirt and sand filled with tumble weeds and Joshua Trees. Nothing green grows in Apple Valley except by costly irrigation and constant care by a green thumb. Flowers are rare.
On a particular April Sunday the service had contained my youthful energy to a breaking point. Once the final song had been sung, me and my gang trotted out of the sanctuary into the spring sun. I had three main friends back then. Tim was the tall one in the group; he had black hair and a five o’clock shadow by the time he was ten. Kevin was skinny and was the fastest, also the most full of energy. Kev could run a mile and not even return winded. Troy had a hilariously high pitched laugh and was the rebel of the group. I was the hands down leader of our little group; I usually came up with the things we would do to fill up time.
That particular day we just sat in the front of the church building. The church’s concrete courtyard was surrounded by a blacktop parking lot on one side and the upside-down dixie cup-like church building on the other. Flanking the entrance doors were two squares of dirt, supported about three feet from the ground by four walls of stone slabs. On these small walls is where we found ourselves that Sunday; probably talking about Star Wars.
Temptation entered our little minds when the desert wind began blowing across the courtyard. Like the apple to Eve was a strong desert wind to four bored boys. A weird trick of architecture created a swirled wind against one side of the church. If you threw something into this whirlwind, whatever you threw swirled up to the heavens before flying out to desert. We had plenty of time to kill before our parents finished their after-church conversation hour, so we began looking for things to throw.
Now to understand the depth of our rebellion you have to know two things. First, remember what I told you before; we lived in a desert where green things are discouraged. Two, you have to know Ray Harris.
The first thing you noticed about Ray Harris was that he was big. Maybe over 350 pounds. He had a grey and black peppered beard that might have belonged to Abraham, and his breath always stank. His voice was deep and raspy when he taught the mysteries of Revelation to my Sunday School class. Ray Harris was a great and old man. He cleaned and gardened the Church and the Christian School for next to no salary, or maybe for free; I can’t remember. What I do remember is the many times I would be in my dad’s office and hear Ray coming in from watering what plants the church had, heaving his bad breath all over the hallway. Everyone in the church loved Ray Harris.
Going back to that windy Sunday afternoon in April. Ray had just planted beautiful pink and purple flowers around the single bushes that grew in either plot of the dirt flanking the church doors. He had probably spent his whole Saturday afternoon crouched over, the desert sun beating down on his old body, raking those plots of dirt into submission. The same plots of dirt that four bored boys sat around after church, looking for something to throw into the gusty wind. The flowers were the obvious choice; bright so you could easily follow their flight and light enough that the wind could easily give them wings to fly away. I can’t even remember if I had a second thought about Ray Harris, or about his hard labor or his lost Saturday; I just picked those flowers right out of their prepared soil. The flowers did indeed take off on the whirlwind, swirling around and around and around until flying high into the cloudless sky and disappearing towards the mountains. We picked and picked those flowers till nothing was left of Ray Harris’s handy work but a few roots and tilled soil.
And that was it, I thought.
Once the fun of flowers and wind had been exhausted, we probably played tag or some such game till our parents took us one by one into vans and SUV’s back to our homes. I was taken home in our green van without having a second thought of my crime. The Sunday afternoon then progressed normally: football and food. Until, that is, my dad asked me the question. I don’t know if he noticed the flowerless garden or someone saw us in the act and ratted us out. All I know is that my innocent Sunday was disrupted by the question my father asked me: “Did you pick the flowers out front of the church today?”
I was truthful. The story spilled out of my mouth; from picking to whirlwind I told all. I don’t know if any of my friends got in any trouble over the flower incident, but I sure did. My dad rarely got mad at me, rarely. I didn’t get in trouble much, but I got in trouble that Sunday. I believe it was the last time I was ever spanked.
It wasn’t that I had picked and thrown flowers, that wasn’t the crime; it was that I had picked Ray Harris’s flowers and thrown them. Respect. It was all about respect. My dad wanted me to have respect for everyone I ever met. Ray Harris had worked hard at those flowers, and I had destroyed them for my own pleasure. I had placed my interests above Ray Harris’s. That little flower picking was an expression of a selfish soul. My dad saw this and put a stop to it. Put other’s needs ahead of your own and respect others; these values my dad made sure I remembered.
For years afterward I wondered why my dad was so heated over such a small thing. He never got mad at me, but something about that flower incident got him worked up. Later, though, I recognized the beauty of my dad’s parenting; he solved big problems at little times. My dad understood that if I could respect something as small as Ray Harris’s flowers, I could respect my mom enough to be back by curfew; I could respect my teachers enough to do my best in class; I could respect myself enough to decline an offered bag of weed. My dad understood this. Ray Harris’s flowers may have saved me from many a sinful path.
Parents listen up: enough small crime lessons learned, and the big crimes might never come.