by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
On a typical Friday inside LaMee the Florist, the floral arrangements run about $30 but the answers to prayer are free.
The shop’s design offers rest for the downtown worker’s senses. The hum of the refrigerator combines with the classical piano drifting from the stereo to drown out the sounds of traffic rushing down Bay Street outside. The sweet smell of fresh-cut flowers pervades the place. Plants, vines, flowers, sprouts, cover walls and ledges accented with waist-high vases and artwork.
But the spirit of the place hangs on a wall behind the register. Next to a stack of empty order sheets hangs a hand–scrawled list that keeps manager Jerri Ann Bisset’s customers coming back day after day and year after year.
“I don’t put people’s names on the prayer list,” says Bisset. “Just what they need. Sometimes people come back and tell me I can cross this or that off the list. Sometimes the needs just stay on there.”
Bisset runs a decorating business successful enough that she won’t mention the name. “I can’t handle any more business,” she says. But she’s managed this store in the atrium of Independent Square for six years because of the connection with her customers.
“I share in anniversaries and graduations. You’d be amazed at the amount of people who come in here to pick up a flower for their co-workers just because they’re having a bad day,” she says.
She sees the other end of life’s spectrum, too: husbands hoping to fix a marriage with a dozen roses, consolation arrangements bought for a funeral.
Every flower bought has a feeling behind it, she says. Standing behind the register invests her in dozens of emotional transactions each day. It’s the reason her eyes water when a customer tells her the stuffed rabbit just purchased “is going to make my daughter’s day.”
The two men who came into her store Friday had no idea about the prayer list. They had left the courthouse 15 minutes earlier in search of the nearest flower store. Wearing a suit and clutching a merchant marine cap in his hand, one of the men, a retired sailor, barked his order like Bisset was an apprentice on an ocean-going freighter.
“I need a dozen long-stemmed roses, yellow,” said Arthur Baredian. “And I need them in five minutes.”
Bisset didn’t have them in stock. She picked up her phone and started dialing as Baredian explained his urgency. They were celebrating a land deal, he explained. The flowers were for the clerk who had just filed the paperwork.
“This man drives a cement mixer six days a week to feed his family, and on the seventh he preaches the Lord’s word,” said Baredian, clapping Pastor James Wilcox on the shoulder.
Baredian had always dreamed of being a preacher, wanted to build a youth center on a tract of East Jacksonville land. Wilcox had been looking for land to build his own youth center. He prayed eight years for God to deliver the land, but could never get the money together.
His dreams of preaching behind him, Baredian was selling his land for $35,000. Wilcox still couldn’t afford it, so they split the difference.
“For a dollar,” says Baredian, smiling. “Both of our dreams were to put a youth center on that property, now it’s going to happen. All we need now are the roses. The young lady said she wanted yellow roses, and when a woman says what she wants, you’d better give it to her.”
Minutes after the words leave his mouth, the roses arrive. The pastor and the sailor headed toward the courthouse. Another prayer had been answered in the heart of downtown.