Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [112]
To the middle-class wives and children across this land whose male head of household has recently departed, learn the truth of his present condition from yet another great contemporary poem by the Statler Brothers, “Flowers on the Wall”:
I keep hearing you’re concerned
About my happiness.
But all the thought you’ve given me
Is conscience, I guess.
If I were walkin’ in your shoes
I wouldn’t worry none.
While you ’n’ your friends are worryin’
’Bout me
I’m havin’ lots of fun:
Countin’ flowers on the wall,
That don’t bother me at all,
Playin’ solitaire till dawn
With a deck of fifty-one,
Smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’
Captain Kangaroo.
Now don’t tell me
I’ve nothin’ to do.
Tonight I dressed in tails
Pretending I was on the town;
Long as I can dream it’s hard to
Slow this swinger down.
So please don’t give
A thought to me,
I’m really doin’ fine,
And you can always find me here,
I’m havin’ quite a time:
Countin’ flowers on the wall,
That don’t bother me at all,
Playin’ solitaire till dawn
with a deck of fifty-one,
Smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’
Captain Kangaroo.
Now don’t tell me
I’ve nothin’ to do.
It’s good to see you,
I must go,
I know I look a fright;
Anyway my eyes are not
Accustomed to this light.
And my shoes are not
Accustomed to this hard concrete,
So I must go back to my room
And make my day complete:
Countin’ flowers on the wall,
That don’t bother me at all,
Playin’ solitaire till dawn
With a deck of fifty-one,
Smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’
Captain Kangaroo.
Now don’t tell me
I’ve nothin’ to do.
© Copyright 1965, 1966 by Southwind Music.
• • •
This was written by Lew DeWitt, the only one of the four Statler Brothers to have been divorced. It is not a poem of escape or rebirth. It is a poem about the end of a man’s usefulness.
The man understands that his wife deserves the tragic dignity of being a widow now.
• • •
Or so he feels.
And much of what any human being feels is oceanic. The wife of a man counting the flowers on the wall may not yearn so much to be a widow, and yet the culture in which the man is floating may be telling him that it is right for her to yearn for that.
He is no longer needed as a father, and no longer useful as a soldier who could stop a bullet winging toward his loved ones, and he has no hope for being honored for his wisdom, for it is well understood that people only become more tiresome as they grow old.
The man is experimenting with the Christian idea of heaven without actually dying, and more and more women, of course, are doing it, too. In heaven, you see, or so the childish dream goes, people are liked and honored simply for having been alive. They don’t have to have any utility up there.
The man counting flowers on the wall has no appreciable utility anymore. He probably wasn’t all that good in earning money even when he was in his prime. What is he waiting for?
For an angel to knock on his door. Angels love anybody who has simply been alive.
• • •
It seems to me that the most universal revolutionary wish now or ever is a wish for heaven, a wish by a human being to be honored by angels for something other than beauty or usefulness.
The women’s liberation movement of today in America, in its most oceanic sense, is a wish by women to be liked for something other than their reproductive abilities, especially since the planet is harrowingly overpopulated. And the rejection of the Equal Rights Amendment by male state legislators is this clear statement by men, in my opinion: “We’re sorry, girls, but your reproductive abilities are about all we can really like you for.”
The truth.
• • •
There are other hard truths about the old and those without friends and those without skills or capital, and on and on.
• • •
No angel knocked on my door while I was counting flowers on the wall, but an old friend with the gambling sickness was quick to find me. He had never borrowed anything from me, but now my turn had come. He told me of a family emergency, and asked for a sum that was just about the size of