Letter: It Was The Daisies That Did It

I saw him coming down the inner hallway, passing door after office door as he drew nearer. Pretty hard not to notice. To my recollection no one had brought flowers – let alone such a huge bouquet of daisies – to our medical clinic before.

Wondering at the occasion, smiling as the fellow approached, I clasped my hands below my chin, my elbows propped then on the computer table of the receptionist desk and I watched him through the glass door through which he would momentarily enter, contemplating who among our staff would be so honored.

He was tall, casually dressed, might even have been good looking but that particular observation would have to wait as the flowers he held hid his face.

“Ohhhh,” I said, aloud, nodding my head in sudden acknowledgement of the face-hidden-behind-the-flowers-thing. ‘It’s a surprise,’ I thought. ‘He didn’t want to be seen.’

Whether handsome or not, one thing was for sure. The daisies were beautiful. A wild profusion of color, yellow daisies, white daisies, purple daisies, pink daisies, magenta daisies, burgundy daisies – daisies upon daisies – stuck out everywhere from the vase.

What a lover! What a lucky girl! How embarrassed she would be! Was it one of the new girls they had hired? Maybe he was going to propose? Where was her cell phone? She would capture this special moment on camera.

Then, suddenly, inexplicably, just before reaching the door to their office – the last office directly down the length of the hall of the office complex – he turned left.

And ran head on into a plate glass window that ran nearly floor to ceiling in the hallway, just to the left of their door.

Needless perhaps to say, my eyes grew twice their size, the clasped hands below my chin grasped both sides of my face in shocked surprise, my mouth gaped open but no words came.

Patients in the waiting room glanced up from magazines; those who had been dozing were rudely awakened; the nurse who had entered just moments before dropped her clipboard at the sight of daisies – a wild profusion of daisies – thudding against the plate glass window, the clunk and clonk of the sound the result of the fellow bonking his head against the glass, fortunately, as it would turn out, the blow cushioned by the daisies.

‘Good thing he had such a big bunch of daisies,’ I thought as I joined medical staff rushing to his aide.

He appeared unhurt, well, physically uninjured, though his face now registered several shades of pink indicating he had suffered somewhat of embarrassment.

“I thought this was the door,” he muttered meekly, still grasping the daisies – some of which were crushed a bit – tilting his head toward the plate glass window that extended from near the floor to near the ceiling.

I thought of suggesting to him that the ‘door’ did not have a handle; that there was no push plate on the ‘door;’ nor did the plate glass ‘door’ have the appropriate name of our clinic etched in quite large and bold letters.

But I thought better of it.

I did learn that he had picked up his order of daisies at the florist nearby; that while he was on the road he thought he would go ahead with his blood draw; that ‘no’, they were not for anyone in our office, he just did not want them stolen from his truck while he kept his appointment; that he was sorry for having caused such a disturbance for which all the medical staff gathered around unanimously said ‘not to worry,’ and that ‘this had happened before’ (though it never had), and so on.

He accepted my offer to display his beautiful bouquet of daisies for whomever they were purchased, at likely great expense, on my receptionist desk while he kept his appointment.

I sat then with my hands clasped below my chin, my elbows propped on the computer table, and gazed at the wild profusion of daisies, yellow and white and purple and pink and magenta and burgundy.

And I thought to myself, ‘this guy ran into the plate glass window, not because he couldn’t see that it wasn’t a door.

‘He’s in love.’