Years ago, in another life, I watched the late floral designer Bobb Wirfel, deconstruct a tulip.
Bobb brought beauty and clarity and grace to everything he did. He was a gentleman with one of the most sincere smiles I have ever been privileged to receive. A lovely soul with a kind heart and mesmerizing wit.
A bride wanted peonies for her bridal bouquet and peonies were out of season.
Bobb stood at his station, telling me a witty story, and with his artist’s hands, gently peeled back the petals of a pale pink tulip. Wiring & taping each individual petal, never crushing its beauty.
He did this for what seemed like forever with what seemed like hundreds of tulips.
Then, still talking but never faltering in his movements, he began to assemble the wired tulip petals, weaving from them a peony.
Still tulip petals but transformed into a different form, something richer, fuller, fragrant with meaning.
All for a young woman who wanted to carry peonies down the aisle on her wedding day.
In still another life, when I studied Roland Barthes and his theory of text as a braid, I thought of Bobb and that bouquet.
Barthes posited that all text comes from previous texts, that writers and readers pull strands from the braid and reweave them into a new, but connected text.
Like Bobb creating peonies out of tulips.
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