MakeItBetter.net
By: Melanie Kalmar
Larsen Jay doesn’t know anything about flowers, other than how happy they made him feel after a near-fatal accident left him confined to a hospital room.
The Knoxville, Tenn., native and former film and TV producer—“Erin Brockovich” is among his credits—was repairing a roof when he fell from a ladder, about one and a half stories down, onto concrete. He broke a lot of bones on that July day in 2007 and required “11 surgeries and counting.”
He was surprised by how much the dozens of floral bouquets, sent by family and friends, brightened his hospital room and lifted his spirits. “I had never been given flowers before, most guys aren’t,” he says. Restless and not knowing what to do with all of those bouquets, he began delivering them to patients who didn’t have flowers.
At his first stop, he met a woman, all alone and in full traction.
“She had a desperate look in her eyes, of ‘pull the plug, help me,” he says.
When he gave her a big bouquet, she smiled and cried.
“I couldn’t do anything about her injury or recovery, but for that second, I shifted her mental state from desperation to a little bit of joy.”
He kept thinking, somebody must be doing this. But nobody was, until, a year to the date of his accident, he changed careers and founded Random Acts of Flowers from the warehouse he fell off. His wife, Adrian, a former journalist, handles publicity. Their children, Henry, 6, and Alexander, 3, occasionally join their parents on deliveries.