11. An Interlude

Then, one day, it occurred to me that I'd never bought a daisy at a flower shop, at least not intentionally, and I wondered what I might learn about Bellis perennis and its position among its peers by finding a florist in town to sell me, say, a couple dozen. I was, as of this writing, new to a college town, so I emailed my colleagues for suggestions and got two responses: the literature professor said that even when she lived in North Carolina would she order all her flowers from Stephanie's, and the poet said a place with the name Jester's was always good to drop by for browsing and idle chat with the experts.

Months passed before I had any occasion to which bringing a bouquet of flowers would be appropriate. Yes, they do say that any occasion is a good occasion for flowers, but everyone knows this nonsense comes from the clever wheedling of florists hoping to get you to drop thirty-forty bucks on their merchandise. I waited and was patient. As the semester ended, our friend Heather's due date became less of a far-off abstraction, and we decided it was time to throw her the kind of baby shower where men and women alike could wish the couple well, and where no one would be forced to play fatuous parlor games. And here, at last, was an occasion for not just flowers, but lo! a baby! for those little innocent daisies I'd been, these past months, wasting so much breath over.

I decided to call ahead to those florists my colleagues had recommended. When Stephanie's answered I went: "Um, yeah. Do y'all have ... uh, daisies?" Stephanie's did have daisies. Stephanie's's daisies were 85 cents apiece. "How many do you have?" I asked. "Or: how many do you think you'll have by Saturday?" I wanted three dozen. I'd pictured many small bouquets of daisies in tall drinking glasses just sort of thrown all over the house of our friend Amy, who was hosting. The woman on the line went to go check. It took but a silent minute.

"Sir," she said. "They're not Gerber daisies."

"That's fine," I said.

They had plenty, but I called Jester's to give them a fair shot at my business, and the man who answered told me he didn't believe they did have daisies in stock. "Lemme go check real quick," he said and set the phone down. In the background I heard Barry Manilow sing, "Caught up in a world of uphill climbing, the tears are in my eyes, and nothing is rhyming."

"Only thing we have is red and yella Gerber daisies," the man from Jester's said to me. "But they are sold."

Gerbera hybridae is a species under the genus named in 1737 for a German physician lost to history. They are heavy and often require little prophylactic straws to prevent bowing. I am not interested in Gerber daisies.

I made a plan to stop by Stephanie's Saturday afternoon on the way to Amy's, and to buy three dozen for $33.35 with tax. Neal and I were in charge of food, and one afternoon he trekked clear to Birmingham to grab cheese and beer at Costco. That he and I had thought hard about and planned for this trip, and that on the phone that Friday morning we were vocally excited about the selection of grocery items there, was just the latest in an ongoing string of reminders that we live, now, in our thirties, very adult lives. Costco, it turned out, also had daisies. For cheap.

"They're nine dollars," Neal said of the pre-wrapped bunch. "Here, I'll send you a picture. Call me back." I waited for the email and clicked the attachment. Were those daisies? Why were the capitula so green? Why did the florets curve and curl upward rather than shoot flat out like blades of ivory grass?

"I think they're white chrysanthemums," I told him when I called back. I felt somewhat of an expert. I'd been burned before and I wouldn't let it happen again.

"White chrysanthemums?" he said.

"I don't know. They don't look right."

"They're nine dollars," he said. "And I'm not gonna count them but there are way more than a dozen in here."

He was right. We were on a budget. "Okay, yeah, what the hell?" I said, and Neal snatched up the bunch.

At home they got a lot of scrutiny. "Daisies don't smell very nice," I said, not knowing anything of it. "No, they don't," Neal said. All the same we took them to the shower. Neal cut the stems and set them in a silver water-service pitcher by the stereo. I set out food while Amy's daughter Daisy watched me like a hawk and snacked on our grapes.

"Are you a boy or a girl?" she asked, grinning.

"What do you think?" I asked.

"A boy!" she said. It was some kind of riddle. Then, shortly after: "You have a funny name."

Oh, I have the funny name, I thought, spraying Olive Oil Pam on a sliced up baguette. I do. And at the end of the night I took the daisies home, mistaking who they'd been meant for all along.

10. Boy Parts, Girl Parts

Flowers are feminine things, but there's no clear way of understanding why. Is it that we leave adornment for women, that we are not the birds? One way flowers' innate femininity is false is linguistic.  Flower, the noun, is male in Latin (flos), Hebrew (perach), Russian, (цветок), Polish (kwiat), Italian (fiore), Irish (bláth), and Norwegian (blomst/blome). Doubtless others. The other way it's not true is morphological. Most flowers—the Asteraceae at least—contain both a stamen and a pistil, and owing to their names' unlikelihoods I'm going to let you guess re the sex of these organs which is which. Botanists confusingly refer to this trait in flowers as bisexuality, but if they were little humans we'd call them intersex, the lately added I to this new world's ever-growing GLBTQIAA acronym.

All this, however, runs counter to what we just know: flowers are feminine. And if the flower is a feminine object then the daisy is perhaps our girliest. It would be unthinkable to name a boy Daisy to everyone other than those couples who see having a baby as an opportunity to break down traditional gender boundaries.

Is why that girl group SHeDAISY feels so poorly named. Wacky caps aside: how dully redundant! Like naming a band HePENIS.

9. Of Human Bondage

Another summer game for little girls: knot the stembottom of one daisy noosely under the head of another. Continue until a loop is formed, large enough to drape around your own little neck. Abracadabra. You are a princess from some far-off place.

It's been given in these modern times more figurative uses, but defining what makes a chain a daisy chain is difficult. There seems a requisite asymmetry of the links. A causal string of consequence—one element of Link₁ appearing in and exerting influence on Link₂. Or? The OED won't help, lazily allowing that the literal daisy-garland definition has been transf. into more fig. uses. What quot'd examples that don't come from the military come from commodities trading: a group that buys and sells only among itself so as to inflate prices before selling on the open market. It's in this way that chains get daisied. A you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours system of blooming self-interest.

Which leads us back to the tawdry: the daisy chain as sex act. Like a 69 to the nth power, where n = your total swinging volunteers. Through careful planning (n ≡ 0 [mod 2], to start) can a daisy chain be kept safely heterosexual, but when I see those words I see something smuttier. A sagged loop of Craigslisted strangers. Every daisy dicksucker his own Lucky Pierre.

8. Peace, Little Girl

There was a time not too long ago when the daisy had a certain vigor. This vigor was either rooted in the daisy's symbolic innocence, or it stemmed from same, and that these puns are unavoidable tells us something about flowers as a means of cognition. We've got the poor things tangled up in our idioms.

I'm talking, I'm afraid, about the 1960s. That time when the center stopped holding. Or, if you want, when the wave finally broke and rolled back. It was in 1964 that LBJ wanted to continue the administration he got handed aboard Air Force One the previous fall—his freshly dead president just miles away, Jackie stricken at his side, and Jack Valenti within his raised right arm's reach, rheumy over a bouquet of you guessed it. Johnson in August got Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and by the end of the month polled 27 points over Goldwater. And yet, to acquire a presidency from an assassin and not an electorate is like going stag to a prom whose decorations committee you once volunteered for. No one wants a wallflower legacy. So in September, the Democratic National Committee aired what everyone seems to agree was the first televised attack ad, starring a girl in a field. In her little fist she holds a daisy.

"One, two, thray, four," a voiceover counts amid bird-twitters. The girl's pretty much ripping the florets from the flower's capitulum.

"Five, seven, six.... Six...."

There's an adorableness here. More birds.

"Eight, nine.... Ni—"

She doesn't get to repeat nine because another, colder voiceover cuts her off, reversing and thus undoing her careful counting.

Then the shot of the girl freezes. The camera zooms in on her eye. As the countdown hits one we're in tight on her pupil, and inside that pupil an A-bomb explodes into a mushroom cloud. It goes off right in her eyeball. Cue LBJ:

These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God's children can live, or go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.

Three years later, Johnson had ordered more bombs dropped on North Vietnam than were dropped on Japan in the entire Second World War. More bombs than were dropped on Korea. In October of 1967 a 17-year-old named Jan Rose Kasmir found herself in Washington D.C. at the wrong end of a line of bayonets. It was the March on the Pentagon, held at a time when majority opinion had turned against the country's involvement in Vietnam. Abbie Hoffman was there, dressed as Uncle Sam. So were Norman Mailer, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and photographer Marc Riboud, who snapped at a crucial moment a photo of Kasmir holding a daisy like a talisman in front of a wall of MPs. This was the flower's power.

Riboud's is a black-and-white photograph. Kasmir's eyes are wide open. A line glows along the edge of her rippled silhouette, backlit from the setting sun. She's got the daisy turned away from the camera, as though letting it seek out that last light. As though the thing were too powerful for the military to behold head-on.

Forty-five years later I find Jan Rose Kasmir to ask her about that day. "I hope this is not too big a comedown," she writes. "But it was a chrysanthemum. Not a daisy."

What it means to me that it's not a daisy held for eternity before a dozen loaded rifles and sharpened bayonets is that the world cannot always fit into the hopes I might have for it. That plans are often funny things to make. Kasmir's email wasn't so much a comedown as a total devastation. Even her middle name is wrong. I should have seen this coming.

Though it only aired once, after 9pm EST, during NBC's Monday Night at the Movies, the Daisy Ad was viewed by an estimated 50 million people. In a poll that week, 53 percent of women and 45 percent of men agreed that Barry M. Goldwater, if elected, would push the United States to war. Johnson won 61 percent of the popular vote in November. Goldwater went on to write, in 1993, that "[y]ou don't need to be 'straight' to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight."

Kasmir's hands, in her iconic photo, are just inches from some young boy's blade. Both hands hold the mum, as though it were fragile. A few miles away, protest-rock band the Fugs played a free outdoor concert. To Washington they'd brought with them dozens and dozens of daisies. The plan: drop them from an airplane over the Pentagon. It was a time of wild garbage notions. Abbie Hoffman reportedly tried to get enough kids chanting that they'd collectively raise the Pentagon into the air. And then turn it orange.

Kasmir offered to get me in touch with the British reporter who once told her this bit about the Fugs, but what would be the use? Where could this lead even lead me? It's the white chrysanthemum that means "truth" in the language of flowers. Not the daisy.