Before my boss left for vacation last Friday, he called me into his office to give me some instructions for his absence.

�I have a task for you,� he announced, seated behind his desk while I stood in the doorway of his office. I waited. He pointed above his head, to a bedraggled plant weeping out of its plastic pot.

�Get me a new plant,� he said. I nodded, waiting for the rest of his instructions.

�That is all,� he said.

Because he hasn�t been here all week, I found no reason to enter his office until today, when I opened the locked door to put his mail on his desk. The plant, deprived of water for a week, slumped down the sides of his bookcase, onto the floor. Right: my one task.

I don�t know what kind of plant to get him. I have several plants at my desk, left over from the previous tenant at this job. They�re all hideous and misshapen, because I don�t know how to trim them properly, and because I feed them Diet Coke and coffee. I put my one good plant�a gardenia given to me by Lorelei�out on the patio, where it gets rain and sunlight and is out of range of the soda. I dislike most indoor plants, and find them artless and sterile. My taste tends to the impractical: a pot of blue hyacinths, or a drift of lilies of the valley. The kind of plant that will bloom for five or six days, then wither away gracefully. The kind of plant that we referred to, when I worked for Superior Garden, as �cut flowers in dirt.�

�Superior Garden� is the pseudonym I�m assigning to my former employer, an upscale gardening shop on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. I got the job the summer before I was married�an endeavor that lent a certain surreal quality to life, and rendered it impossible for me to take anything as mundane as employment quite seriously. Never having worked in a retail outfit, I was pleasantly surprised when Matt, the manager, called to offer me a job. The salary was mind-numbingly low, but I accepted the position, working every Saturday and every other Wednesday, largely for the 40% discount the job offered. �This store,� Matt explained to me, �is not really for gardners. It�s for people who want to have the gardening lifestyle.� He explained that our job was to sell these would-be gardeners expensive linen clothes and accessories, to make them feel more in touch with nature.

I liked the job, despite Craig, the annoying assistant manager, whose bowl haircut and wide, vacant smile masked a deep passive-aggressive streak. He laughed way back in his throat, �Hyuh-hyuh-hyuh� and when talking to other guys, made his voice affectedly low, for an air of superiority. He followed us around like a shadow, swooping down on slackers with a smile that didn�t reach his eyes, and an intense, �How�s it going?� that was code for �Why aren�t you working?� It didn�t matter if we actually were working. Once, he swooped down on me as I paged through a catalog looking for an item for a customer who waited at the front counter. He hovered in front of me, and I looked up from the catalog.

�How�s it going?� he asked, staring at me with a frozen smile.

�Fine,� I said, falsely cheerful, then dismissed him by turning my back and ostentatiously calling to the customer that I�d found the item he wanted.

We sold a lot of potted plants at Superior. The wreaths of rosemary and ivy topiaries were popular and fairly easy to maintain, but we also had stands of bright hydrangeas and tulips. Displayed in the front window, their colors drew in customers, who scooped them up by the armload. A good number of them were gifts, and very few were returned, until one day, late in the summer, when a girl interrupted me at the �cash-wrap� to complain about a purchase. She had bland, regular features, and expensively streaked honey-blonde hair, and she was holding a tiny clay pot holding the remains of a miniature sunflower. The stem was still green, but the flower had faded�those things don�t have tremendous life expectancy, but no one had apparently ever explained that to her.

The girl spoke in a style I call �the quack,� characterized by rapid, throaty, monotonous speech; statements voiced as questions; and a propensity for the phrase �You don�t understand,� pronounced as �yunnerstand.� The quack is generally accompanied by a petulant facial expression and a marked sense of entitlement. This girl displayed all the characteristics, and she impatiently waited for me to finish business with the customer ahead of her before she plunked down the little sunflower on the galvanized counter.

�I wanna return this?� she said, staring at me petulantly.

I looked at the plant and politely asked her why. Still staring at me, she pointed one long, square acrylic nail at the withered bloom, as if she were miming pointing a gun, and quacked, �Um, this part died?�

I thought about explaining the temporal nature of flowers to her. I thought about explaining the nomenclature of the parts of a plant to her. I thought about laughing and telling her to stick to silk flowers. And then I thought about the idea that it�s useless to teach a pig to sing, and gave her another plant. I don�t know if she tried to return that one, but I�d say the odds are good that she did. I didn�t work there very much longer, as it had become tiresome to sell people their dreams, easy as it may have been.

Star of the day. . .Moniquah! Whose marvelous mix CD "20 Songs That Remind Me Of You" arrived to much acclaim