WHERE FLOWERS GROW
Robert Meyers

When I was a small boy, living near the tracks as befitted my economic status, I had great fun with nails and passing trains. A nail laid lengthwise on the track got smashed into a lovely miniature steel sword. Pennies came out of it with some peculiarities, too, until my father explained that something called the Treasury Department took a dim view of spoiling money.

Assorted other objects served for exciting experiments, however, and once there was that inevitable excitement: a vagrant bum, befumed by wine, had lain down on the track and lost both his legs. We boys speculated endlessly on the way this had happened and how it had looked, our mothers having been far too wise to let us go see.

Now that I’m grown up railroads have maturer uses. They carry trains, for one thing, and they provide junior high school art classes with material for illustrating perspective. But there is a third. Since no one ever really looks at a railroad it is a handy thing to walk down if one is searching for solitude. A man walking down a railroad is all but invisible and certain to be let strictly alone. It may be that we still associate the tracks with the bums of Depression days and simply avoid seeing them, or anyone who walks on them. Whatever the reason, you can walk down a railroad track and be sure of privacy.

On a recent visit to my mother’s home town, I enjoyed this privilege as a way of getting from her house out to the farm where we lived years ago. And during the walk I had an experience from which the poetic mind, which is every mind in one degree or other, can draw an analogy. I came suddenly upon some patches of exquisite little wild flowers growing alongside the tracks.

They were so appealing that I stopped to pick one and look at it more closely. The petals were white, tinged with faint purple at the outer edges, and clustered around the golden yellow pollen of the center. Fragile and tiny, they seemed oddly out of place beside the railroad track with its worn steel flanges, its tarred ties, its oil-soaked gravel and chemically-poisoned grasses drooping rustily in the hot sun. One simply did not expect the white purity of a delicate wildflower in that unlikely place. The eye alighted upon it with a definite shock.

And a shock is all that is needed to set the mind to making analogies. I could not help thinking of how many times I have been similarly surprised at finding unexpected beauty. Among some of the roughest and poorest and most ignorant of men I have discovered miniature flowers of rare delicacy and tenderness. In the cunning thief, a strange nobility about women. In the town drunk, an unexpected and compassionate insight into the foibles of mankind. In the faded prostitute, an odd wistfulness about innocence lost almost to memory, even.

To find these small flowers, hidden from the casual glance by weeds and dirt and the used remnants of trade, is instruction in both wonder and tolerance. In wonder, because the mind marvels at the odd juxtaposition of the beautiful and the ugly. In tolerance, because the mind confesses that in the unlikeliest of places one must always be on the alert for that which excites admiration and love.Church people sometimes suppose that the only flowers worth exclaiming over are found in their pews. It is true that cultivated flowers are often far more beautiful and expansive than those which grow in unfavorable soil and without care. But it is a grievous mistake to think that there is no need to keep the eyes open when one walks through the byways and garbage heaps. It is a humbling experience to find growing, even there, the evidence that God cares for beauty and can create it in the most forbidding places. --- 338 Fairway, Wichita, KS 67212