佚名/Anonymous
Every year on my birthday, from the time I turned 12，a white gardenia was delivered to my house in Bethesda, Md. No card or note came with it. Calls to the florist were always in vain-it was a cash purchase. After a while I stopped trying to discover the sender’s identity and just delighted in the beauty and heady perfume of that one magical, perfect white flower nestled in soft pink tissue paper.
But I never stopped imagining who the anonymous giver might be. Some of my happiest moments were spent daydreaming about someone wonderful and exciting but too shy or eccentrics to make known his or her identity.
My mother contributed to these imaginings. She’d ask me if there was someone for whom I had done a special kindness who might be showing appreciation. Perhaps the neighbor I’d help when she was unloading a car full of groceries. Or maybe it was the old man across the street whose mail I retrieved during the winter so he wouldn’t have to venture down his icy steps. As a teenager, though, I had more fun speculating that it might be a boy I had a crush on or one who had noticed me even though I didn’t know him.
When I was 17，a boy broke my heart. The night he called for the last time, I cried myself to sleep. When I awoke in the morning, there was a message scribbled on my mirror in red lipstick:“Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive.”I thought about that quotation from Emerson for a long time, and until my heart healed, I left it where my mother had written it. When I finally went to get the glass cleaner, my mother knew everything was all right again.
I don’t remember ever slamming my door in anger at her and shouting,“You just don’t understand!”because she did understand.
One month before my high-school graduation, my father died of a heart attack. My feelings ranged from grief to abandonment, fear and overwhelming anger that my dad was missing some of the most important events in my life. I became completely uninterested in my upcoming graduation, the senior-class play and the prom. But my mother, in the midst of her own grief, would not hear of my skipping any of those things.