permanent flowers

Permanent flowers is the narrator’s name for the sealed jar of coloured sugarsticks on his father’s Blue Baby Ford. The image recurs in two memories: first as an object glimpsed through the narrator’s sense of his father’s absence from the bungalow, and later on the journey to visit his grandmother. Its appeal lies in a small contradiction: the sweets look desirable and beautiful, but remain wrapped and untouched.

The Jar in the Car

The narrator has no memory of his father staying at the bungalow, though he believes his father must have visited many times in the Blue Baby Ford. On the dashboard sat a glass jar filled with long sugarsticks wrapped in cellophane. Most were yellow, with some green, red, and black. The narrator found them beautiful as well as desirable, but they were never unwrapped or shared. Their display without use gives rise to the comparison with permanent flowers.

A Repeated Image

The jar returns in the account of a Sunday outing, when the father drove the family to Carrick-on-Shannon to visit the narrator’s grandmother. The car again carried its jar of wrapped sugarsticks on the dashboard. Around it, the family’s preparations were unusually careful: the parents wore their best clothes, and Rosaleen and Breedge were dressed alike. The repeated image links the narrator’s early impression of the car with this more fully remembered family journey, while the sweets themselves remain just as inaccessible.

Beauty Held at a Distance

The phrase brings together attraction and withholding. The sugarsticks are vivid and tempting, yet their wrappers stay intact and no one distributes them; like flowers preserved for display, they are present to be looked at rather than enjoyed. The image’s recurrence gives that contrast a quiet persistence. It marks the car as a memorable setting in the narrator’s childhood recollections, without explaining the father’s behaviour or assigning the untouched sweets a definite cause.