Picking Flowers

And a toddler wandering freely in a park

Sidewalk Flowers by JonArno Lawson, illustrated by Sydney Smith

Life’s pretty busy and often enough, it’s grey. Not much happening here. Got to keep moving, we are told, keep on navigating the way through crowds.

Wow, I’m making record time, Lenny said in The Simpsons. If only I had somewhere to be.

Not everyone has somewhere to be. Children, for instance. There are places they ought to be — places someone else wants them to go or thinks it best they are. But they are, if they’re curious, apt to be off and wandering, looking for things at their own pace.

Recently enough to remember, I saw a video a tech guy (if memory serves) had taken of his toddler in a safe public park — a place of hard stone floors but unhostile cyclists. He had sped the video up a good deal to give it energy and direction. And he followed, at a safe distance, as his very little boy wandered around and pursued his transitory interests.

The little boy wanted to go to the fountain and when he sat down at the fountain, he wanted to put his hands on the stone rail that separated him from it. Then he wanted to wander off — avoiding the cyclists who passed slowly by — to a bit of municipal seating, and when he did it he seemed to examine his hands for some time. Then he want to a bike rail — a piece of shiny metal, quite thick, that was about at his chest height. The boy seemed to be raising and lowering himself by his arms from the rail a few times before getting bored and toddling off.

Two things struck me most about this charming clip of about half an hour of unfocused exploring. One was that the little boy was, ever few moments, looking back over his shoulder, and sometimes turning all the way around and waiting, to see if his dad was still there. And the second was that he seemed perfectly happy to march to the beat of his own drum, as soon as he realised that all was still well and he was still safe and protected.

This book is, at least in part, an attempted demonstration of the same phenomenon. But unlike the video I saw, where the father was — I imagine — delightedly following his child with a phone camera for a long time, never for a moment letting him out of his sight — the little girl in this book is somewhat neglected by her father. She wears a vivid red hoodie. He wanders along — tall and bending away from her — in ordinary cross-hatched clothes, of the kind that everyone else wears.

While the father in the video followed his son everywhere he went, in this book, it is the father who attempts to lead his daughter. He does not often look back. She follows him, sometimes hurried, sometimes rushing, as she carries out her own objectives, almost without his interest and without his supervision.

What is her objective? She’s spotted flowers, all over the city. They grow in cracks in the pavement. They grow behind chained up bikes. They grow out of storm drains. Most of the rest of the city, most of the rest of the life on show, has no colour. It’s grey. It’s ordinary. It’s of no vitality and no use, for the girl. But the flowers, they have a colour. They’re growing out of cracks in the ground.

It’s something new.

Now, of these flowers. They’re not famous shapes. They’re weeds, most of them, stubbly, spiny, thistle-type plants.

But as some have said, a flower is just a weed with a marketing budget. And a devoted claque of fans.

This little girl does not know they’re weeds. She simply likes them and wants to pick them up.

This she does.

As she goes on, the little girl spots places and people to whom she wants to give the flowers she collects. She drops them around quite widely, like a munificent king. All the time, her father is hurrying on ahead of her. Will she catch him up? Will she arrive after her fragmented journey at home, where she ought to be?

I enjoyed the illustration of this book. It’s fluid and clean and moves the story along. I believe in the characters, fundamentally. The girl’s father has this thin, reed-like dimension which tells the reader well that he’s a distracted sort. He stalks off ahead of his daughter while she lingers and looks around. He fails, languid as he is, often to turn around and see what she’s been doing.

Stories of this kind are easy, in a way, to ruin. It’s simple enough to conceive of an idea and to think you’re onto a winner. But so many efforts at this sort of thing — especially with the added gimmick that this book is wordless, wholly without description or dialogue — don’t work. They’re boring or, much worse, they’re trite. Some are overly sentimental. This book falls into the latter category, which is not the worst possible fate. It is overly sentimental. It’s just a touch too sentimental for me. But that’s why we write books for children, after all. It’s why some children are still possessed, even while they are being ignored, or hurried up, or told to move it, to pick flowers.