It took me a couple of weeks to get back on my feet, literally and figuratively. My car was a total wreck. Thankfully, I had a friend who lived in the condo complex and she was helpful to me during this time. We have since gotten out of touch, but I hope she is doing well.

    I was always able to afford nice new cars, but now I was unemployed, so I went and got myself a used Honda Accord. I have to say it was a dependable means of transportation for a while.

    Meanwhile, I knew my unemployment would eventually expire and it wasn’t a lot, so I had to start thinking about a new job. When my coworker who I had stayed with in Michigan moved in, she and I talked about what we were going to do. She had a novel suggestion.

    Where she grew up in the East County with her parents, she spent a lot of time gardening. She saw an ad in the paper about a flower stand that was right down the street from where we were living. She asked if I wanted to join her in buying it. I had zero experience with flowers, having grown up a “city boy” in Brooklyn and living in condos here without much area to grow things. I did like flowers though, and it was pretty inexpensive, so I figured sure, let’s give it a shot.

    And so we became business owners. Of a flower stand. We had a party at my place and invited some of the people from our old job. We asked for name suggestions. The winner? The Flower Petaler. I told you, we had some creative thinkers.

    Once or twice a week we would drive up to Carlsbad to the flower gardens. We had acquired a license, so we were able to walk up and down the aisles of freshly cut flowers and buy bunches of different types and then drive back down to our little kiosk in a small mini mall in the Bay Ho neighborhood and make arrangements. Unfortunately, we were not off a main street and so we didn’t get much traffic coming by. We did OK during holidays, but daily it was pretty slow. We wound up having it for 9 months.

    Someone we had worked with at our old company came by the stand and told us she had started working at another place in the same line of work as our previous company. It sounded interesting and so we found a buyer and my short-lived career as a flower arranger came to an end. I went and interviewed and was accepted. I started my new job in December of 1994.