A friend sent me an e-mail from the Hope Flowers school in Bethlehem, in Israel. I love the name -- Hope Flowers. I'd like to name a character that. What would Hope Flowers be like? Let's see. She's be a seeker I think. Someone interested in growing and changing. She'd either be hopeful like her name -- no, that's too easy. I think she'd be more likely to rebel against the hope part of her name some time in her life, be downbeat and depressive and curmudgeonly. Can women be curmudgeonly?
She'd wear dresses from the 1950s, bought at thrift stores, in loud, vibrant prints that show off her uncommonly tiny waist. She'd either wear tiny flats in brightly colored leather, again bought at thrift shops if possible to color-coordinate with her dresses. OR she's be in those lace-up Doc Marten boots with the only bit of color on her feet the shoelaces. I think she's younger than me, maybe 36, or 37, which would make her born in the late 1960s. She's not from where I grew up, in northeastern Pennsylvania. I want to make her a California child of flower children but maybe that's too obvious and would then imply one of her parents changed her/his last name to be "flowers." That isn't improbable. Working at the co-op I've run into a Twinkle and a Greenpeace and Jennifer Juniper. She could be Hope Flowers of Millbrook, New York. There were plenty of wild-eyed, acid-crazed hippies running around up there. Maybe I'll move her to Meander, though, the town in NE Pa that I use in my other stories. She's there because she met Miles Malloy in New York City when he had that job moving sculptures to/from the temporary MOMA in Queens and then back to the new MOMA in midtown.. Miles, son of my main character, Irene. The one who has moved back to her hometown because she inherited her grandmother's house.
Hope wouldn't be typical for her generation. She's prefer the music of her parents, maybe she inherited their LP collection when they died in a car crash or moved to Vancouver, BC? Hope has a brother. Let's call him Seymour. Seymour Flowers. Is that too literal, too J.D. Salinger, too gay? What about Percy instead? I'll have to think more about that.
What does Hope do now? She's some kind of artist. She makes photo album collages out of photographs she finds in junk stores, past generations of anonymous family members no one could remember or ever knew the name of, sent off with the auctioneer when they were getting ready for the esate sale? Hope finds them for cheap in dusty corners of secondhand shops. If she's lucky and finds an intact album, she's careful in the way she disassembles it, in tne the stories she calligraphs below the photos on every page. It's like she's running a rescue operation, a safe haven shelter for lost, abandoned souls. The eyes are the windows of the soul, Hope often says. She uses colored pencils to color in every person in every photograph's eyes. Sometimes their eyes are colors you don't see on real people in real life. That doesn't matter to Hope.
