At my local grocery this morning, the flower scene was in full bloom, so to speak. Flowers everywhere–tossed on the check out counter, held by shoppers, pinned on chests.   So many flowers, in fact, that if I don’t see a flower till I die, it won’t make a difference.

Don’t get me wrong, I am crazy about flowers, all colors, all varieties particularly wild ones, all shapes, all species, especially when they come into my sphere of vision out of nowhere, by surprise. But this orgy of flowers on Mothers’ Day weekend verges on parody, a macabre display of desire and conformity and excess.  And parody is melodrama in another guise,  the fuel of our shopping mania, the tools for holding emotions hostage, for not allowing them to blossom and then fade away, as everything must.  “Intimacy passes,” writes Richard Rodriguez.  So does everything else. But parody  and melodrama…