Sandy Bell has passed on, but his spirit remains with us all
‘Tis the season of love, of boxed chocolates and red wine. Single little roses and lipstick kisses. The Bluff View Art District is the romantic heart of Chattanooga, they say, and last Sunday I walked around up there.
I followed the little cobblestone paths around crooked little corners. The paths are all perfectly made up there. It was all as happy as it could be. Hidden away was a splashing rock pond with little frogs around its edge. They spit water out of their green mouths. Painted tiles around the pond showed peasants working in fields—a man spilling a bag of seed onto the ground and a woman riding a mule. Someone made wishes and dropped coins in the water there.
Down old alleys bakers baked behind steamy windows. They rolled and kneaded their breads on floury tables. A slow barge bellowed far off and pushed its load upstream. Everything smelled like roasting coffee, cinnamon breads and the river.
There’s a small art gallery up there. It was cold and nearly raining so I pulled open that heavy door. I mostly regretted it when I went inside. I had no money and was afraid to touch anything. I put my hands in my pocket and looked around anyway. Near the counter just inside the door a girl was pointing a young man towards a glass case full of silver jewelry. It’s all handmade, she said.
The young man leaned close. He pointed toward a small locket on a silver chain. I went closer to see. The picture in the locket was of a Raphaelite angel in robes playing on an old violin. A dark blue night sky with big stars was all around her. The angel had bright red hair. White angel wings were behind her and a strange tree grew far off in the distance. The locket looked heavy and was encased in old silver.
The girl smiled at the young man through the side of her eyes and took the locket out of the case. But the young man frowned and laughed at her at the same time and said, No, the one beside it. He looked over at me and I left.
I walked around the corner to Rembrandt’s and sat at a table in the courtyard there. The day was going by. Towards evening I heard Billie Holiday singing inside the cafe. Her smoky voice rolled out every time someone opened the doors. Behind the windows people drank from cups and laughed at each other.
A pretty dark-haired girl in a long coat walked past through the courtyard. She smelled like oranges and rain when she went by. Then the young man from the art gallery came out of the cafe door towards her and she smiled. He pulled the girl close and looked quickly back at me sitting alone, smirking as the old wooden cafe doors closed behind them. A small brown bird flew out of the bushes, snatched a breadcrumb from the ground near my feet then skittered away back into the leaves.
I left the courtyard and walked to the street. The boy should have bought the locket, I thought. But those people didn’t really matter. I was looking for some sign of Sandy Bell and only noticed these people because he wasn’t there.
Walking back down Vine Street from the art district I passed the ruins of the old Stone Lion. I remember seeing Sandy there one Valentine’s Day a long time ago. He was out on the porch and I had been there all night with an old girlfriend. I had just spent my last six dollars playing Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out on the jukebox as many times in a row as I could and nearly got in a fight over it. Some frisbee player got mad when I stood over him singing “Tenff! Tenff! Tenff! Tenff!” and the guy swung on me. Avery threw me out. My girl stayed at the bar. On my way down the sidewalk I heard Bruce’s piano and horn section start up again and Sandy said, “It’s a beautiful night.”
And it was.
Many years after my glory days at the Stone Lion the first story I ever wrote for this paper was a short piece about Sandy the Flower Man. A little while after that story ran I received an email from a girl named Angela Tucker in Seattle. She had been given up for adoption when she was a baby and thought Sandy might be her father. She wondered if I would help her find him.
That’s obviously not something you can say no to.
A few months later, sitting on a concrete bench on the south end of Market Street with Angela and her family, Sandy came coasting up on his bicycle with the perpetual flowers in the handlebar basket.
“Is that him?” someone asked, and I said yeah.
That day father and daughter met for the first time. Sandy said it was a “pure miracle”. It felt like one and I soon felt out of place and left as quickly as I could.
My old man told me later that he remembered Sandy from way back in his day. He dismissed the joy I said Sandy brought to people.
“He’s an old hustler,” my old man said. “He used to steal those flowers out of graveyards.”
Hearing this my affection for Sandy the Flower Man was momentarily gone. Maybe he really was just another sidewalk shyster taking advantage of good-natured drunks spilling out of bars. But this notion didn’t last long. It could be true that Sandy began by stealing flowers from flower pots in front of tombstones. This sounds likely.
But Sandy wasn’t just another panhandler. He didn’t beg. Yes, Sandy the Flower Man, with his bells and bared chest and black vests, the wide-brimmed floppy hats and exclamations of “Oh my!” and “Enjoying this weather!”, was a hustler. He took sad flowers left to wilt in graveyards and through some weird alchemy turned them into star-lit joy and laughter for nearly everyone he peddled them to. You can call him a hustler. He hustled handfuls of flowers against who he was and where he came from and somehow he won.
And now, as his daughter Angela said, just like that, he’s gone.
The Flower Man has died. I wasn’t going to find him and there’s not much left to say. The mayor dedicated this Valentine’s Day to him. That was nice. Flower memorials sprang up, then disappeared. There’s talk of a statue of Sandy appearing somewhere. We’ll see how that goes. In the end, he’s just gone.
Walking down the hill towards downtown everything became colder last Sunday. Chattanooga’s always sleepy on cold Sundays. Not too many people were out. And with Valentine’s Day here it occurred to me that I should probably do something other than looking for things I know I won’t find. I’ve turned into one of those fellas the young punks smirk at when they see me sitting alone somewhere. I take it to extremes and walk by myself through the rain sometimes. There were plenty of other things I should’ve been doing, especially with Valentine’s Day upon us.
My old best buddy out in Apison keeps asking me to come see him. He’s one of those people that won’t leave home without a rebel flag displayed somewhere on his clothing. One of them we’re all supposed to hate and try to erase from our world now. I can’t do that. He’s my friend. I could never count the nights we spent riding around through the middle of nowhere with a twelve pack of beer and the radio as loud as it would go. But I can’t go out there again. We started drinking one day when we were fourteen years old and after about twenty years I needed a drink of water. He never stopped and he’s nearly dead now. I don’t want to see it.
There’s the orange-haired Quaker girl who invited me to an hour of silent prayer at the Society of Friends meeting house over in Brainerd. I meant to go but found myself walking around downtown looking for Sandy Bell instead. We all have our own meditations. She gardens in her spare time. There’s something ethereal and harsh about the orange-haired girl. I can’t tell if she’s elevated far above the rest of us or broken like everybody else. Probably both. But one of us is always too busy to find out for sure.
There’s the sister of a childhood friend who calls me about three times a week. She was beautiful twenty-five years ago and has only gotten moreso since then. She’s been pregnant for two-and-a-half years, she says, but “high technology” is controlling her body. She hears voices that tell her something we can’t see is out to get her and her baby. I sat with her in the park the other day and she said that all these people that pass us by are not who they say they are. No one had spoken a word to us. I have to find someone to help me, she said, and lit a cigarette. I don’t know how to help her.
All I know to do is to keep going. And the days go by and night comes and if you’re walking around this city all roads eventually lead you to the river, that old symbol of life.
The river begins at the source and ends at the source, just like everything else. Science knows this. Faith does too, though we’re not supposed to believe such things anymore. Still, if you stand by the edge of the river at night and look down in the little pools along the slow edges you will see a wavy reflection. It’s too unclear to be certain that it’s a reflection of yourself but you would be forgiven for believing so. And the city lights shine on the water way out there and the wind blows from everywhere. It all does something to you.
If you ever go wandering rainy streets and end up standing next to the river alone you should remember that You are the result of a thousand loves, as they say, and laugh at any notion of being alone. Why should you laugh? Because you’re still here and you’d forgotten that you once knew this. Won’t someone think you’re a madman if they hear you laughing in the dark? Probably. For this you should laugh even louder. The poets say that when love is not madness it is not love, and what else are you supposed to do? The least you can do is skip rocks laughing by the river and wait for the universe to make you understand.
Sandy the Flower Man and his strange alchemy turned graveyard flowers into laughter. Everything good is made of such madness and magic. This is the only thing that’s true. You’ll know it if you make yourself believe. It’s right there on the outside of everything you think you know.
If you stand by the river, it’ll come to you from the source like some foghorn blowing way down around Moccasin Bend and float over the water smelling like old flowers and silver bells and the fog. It’ll sneak up behind you and tap you on your wet shoulder and whisper, “It’s a beautiful night.”
Chattanooga resident Cody Maxwell is a longtime contributing writer for The Pulse and is the author of “Chattanooga Chronicles” and “16 Cantos”. Reach him at codymaxwell@live.com