Sunflowers can be beautiful. They are the State flower of the State of Kansas. They are also weeds. I know this because as a teenager I had to walk up and down beanfield rows in Iowa and pull them out of the ground by the roots. They were slightly harder to be rid of than the hated button weeds and cockleburrs that made up the bulk of farm boy plant war enemies.
To be clear, a weed is a plant that grows where you really wish it wouldn’t. Weeds can aggressively take over in places that are outside their natural environment. They can, like sunflowers, be volunteer crops that come up amongst the desired plants, aggressively and with malice, to take away the moisture and the nutrients from the plants you are trying to cultivate.
A picture from Holmes Seed Company… some people pay for sunflowers.
But sunflowers can be a useful plant in their own right. As a farm product they can produce edible seeds, and sunflower oil, like soybean oil, has a multitude of food and industrial applications. Plus, as flowers, sunflowers have a certain hardy and steady beauty that metaphorically symbolize happiness and hope. It is probably the reason Kansas chose it as a State flower, more than the fact that Iowans hate it as a pernicious weed.
People can be sunflowers. I know at this point you expect a little Trump bashing, as both Trump himself and Iowa Congressman Steve King are examples of sunflower people. They thrive where you really don’t want them, and they are very hard to remove from your beloved country crop field. But hopefully, the system will pull the racist weeds out of the soil by the roots so they don’t grow back right away. Robert Mueller as special counsel has his farmer gloves on and he is already going up and down the rows.
So, enough about the weeds.
Let’s talk about the sunflower people we all know and love. They can be weeds, at times, too, but the most important things about them have to do with their basic flower-ness. Just because they tend to vote Republican does not make them weeds. They are all about a primary color. Yellow. That is the color of warmth and sunshine. One thing that always holds true about sunflower people is that they definitely love the people they love, and while living in rural farming communities full of sunflower people, you will be warm in the embrace of a culture that knows how to keep you fed and happy. Yellow is also the color of happiness. Sunflower people know how to celebrate. They get together in large family reunions with lots of grilling and lots of potato salad. They can sing country western songs, and often play the guitar. The women get together in quilt-making clubs that produce beautiful works of blanket art that makes you happy on cold winter nights.
And sunflower people have smiles that radiate who they are in the same way a sunflower does, mirroring the firey orb in the sky the flower is named after.
But make no mistake either.
Sunflower people can burn you with the force of their angry fire if you don’t do the right thing. Their frowns and displeasure can wilt you under righteous heat. And they can do it with just a disgusted look, leaving you as sunburned as a day at the nude beach without sunscreen. They can take root in your life and take hold in a way that eventually takes over, like the sunflowers dominating the flower garden. You had better pay heed, or your other blossoms are lost to you.
Well, that being said, I’ve already written too many words about it for today. I know many sunflower people. I live with some and was raised by others. And you are probably surrounded by similar blooms yourself.
The worst experience I got from this summer’s food delivery came at the hands of a fellow school teacher. I had to deliver faculty lunch to an elementary school in the last week of summer school classes. It was a large lunch with two bags of burgers and a tray loaded with drinks in flimsy cardboard cups. It was a short drive from the restaurant to the school. But when I got there, it was a school with many entrances and kids playing on two different sides of the building. I went to the door I thought the Uber navigator was directing me to. I knocked. When I got no answer, I called the lady who ordered everything. I told her I was at the west door. She told me that I had to find the main door on the south side of the building. So I managed to juggle the two sacks and the easily spillable drinks to three different doors on the south side, all locked. I called again and was told I must have the wrong building, so I went to the school building across the street and found an office building with only kindergarten and daycare kids present. I called again.
Catch a Falling Star 
More Powerful Than a Potassium-Rich Banana
It is a time when we need a hero to step forward. Of course, we are always in need of heroes. There is so much in our little lives that depends on the strong among us to shield us from the darkness that fills the universe. And heroes come in many forms. There was a time when I needed a hero to step forward and deliver me from evil in the Emergency Room in Pearsall Texas. I was there because I was suffering from a severe lack of potassium in my bloodstream. You don’t realize how important balanced potassium in the bloodstream is until you don’t have it. The shakes, the pain, the fog interfering with my cognitive functioning would all have overwhelmed me permanently if the banana doctor had not run a potassium-rich IV directly into a vein in my arm and then proscribed bananas and apples in my diet when he let me go home without an expensive hospital stay. I never learned his name, hence the epithet of “banana doctor”, but he was a hero to me when I needed one.
I think the real point here is, though, that we are forever needing heroes to step up. More than once, as a school teacher, it was me who was called on to step up and do the hero job. Talking on the phone late on a Saturday night to a suffering, suicidal teen, getting between two middle school girls and a leering stranger on a field trip in San Antonio, facing down a berserk child with real metal ninja throwing stars in a school hallway and getting him to run away rather than pursuing his target… gawd, looking back, I should’ve been scared out of my wits. Don’t tell my mother that those things really happened.
And maybe that is the only place we should really be looking for heroes, inside ourselves. Believe me, there is no Superman or Wolverine in the real world outside of the one in your own heart. And that one will step up and answer the call if you sincerely need him… or her. Take it from a guy once known in high school as “Superchicken”. Now there’s an inspiring superhero name!
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