Andy really was a pocket kind of guy – that’s why when his mother made him a special pair of beige pants with extra large square pockets he thought it was the best gift he had ever received. Lots of pockets, on the knees, at the waist and even on the side of the thigh, and very large, about eight inches square, could hold just about anything a 9-year-old boy could ever want to carry. And he filled them sometimes! At Johnny’s birthday party, other children gave him angry looks because he seemed to have an unfair advantage for collecting piñata candy. One Summer afternoon he filled his pockets with soil and wild daisies just to see if he could be a walking garden. (It lasted until he went inside the house for dinner and his mother made him leave the dirt and flowers outside.)
His mother was smart when she made his clothes – she always made parts detachable or re-useable. Their small family didn’t have too much money after moving from the city, so what was pants one year might be part of a patchwork quilt as soon as he outgrew them. She figured out how important those pockets were, and took them off and sewed them onto a new pair of pants when he outgrew the first pair. She had to reinforce the insides of the pockets with some plaid scraps leftover from father’s old flannel shirt, but on the outside they were still the same worn, beige pockets.
Mother missed city life. Every morning she would wake up and look out the window – when father asked why, she said it was too quiet. While tending the vegetable garden she would often hum a tune that reminded Andy of the cars passing by outside their old city apartment window. Nothing about her humming reminded him of the sirens of emergency vehicles that would sometimes pass by. You only remember the things you really like sometimes.
At school he kept pens and pencils and markers in his pockets sometimes. When he got older he kept other things which he probably shouldn’t have had in there. After an incident at school, his father tried to start searching his pockets to make sure he wasn’t keeping anything in there that he shouldn’t be. That didn’t last too long because it took his father (a very thorough person) about 20 minutes to go through all the items in Andy’s pockets, and he was a busy man and didn’t want to take the time. Drinking his afternoon coffee in the old green armchair was a far more pleasing use of the time.
When Andy was 14, his mother fell ill. Sometimes she didn’t seem sick, but just very sad. The doctor could find nothing wrong with her, so Andy did everything he could think of to try and cheer her up. They sat together and talked, they made bread and cookies together, and one day Andy went out and picked so many wildflowers that they filled up his pockets and he brought them back into the house.
“Remember when I tried to be a walking garden with the dirt and the daisies?” He said. Of course she remembered – it took a lot of washing to get those pockets clean again. “Well, I guess now I’m just a walking bouquet.” Her lips parted a little as she tried to smile at how ridiculous it all was. Andy’s father returned from work while the flowers were still in Andy’s pockets. He laughed nervously and then together they placed the wildflowers all over the house, in cups and champagne flutes when they ran out of glass vases.
Andy’s mother died that evening, sleeping, and Andy’s father cried all night at her bedside. Andy spent the night tending to the wildflowers, ripped from their backyard and placed in cups and vases all over the house.
