Just visited this site to link to the lyrics...
The song has been embedded in my being since the release of the movie, and I have not, until now, looked any deeper into it's meaning. And I did not consciously make a connection between the song and my gift to Nan until just now...
This is Scott Nickell's interpretation, I hope he doesn't mind me re-publishing it here...
"The Fassbinder film is "Berlin Alexanderplatz," which (I think) was actually a 14-part series for German television. "And the florist says: White lily." In the film, she actually says "A white carnation." When the one-armed man asks why, she says "You asked for a funeral flower, didn't you?" (These are all paraphrases -- it's been many years since I saw this) Presumably, Laurie either just remembered it incorrectly, or delibarately changed it, since in America, the lily is more associated with funerals -- the stereotypical image of a corpse holding a single white lily to his breast. Also, I seem to remember that at this point in the story, he had not yet lost his arm, though I may be mistaken."
And his version of Anderson's lyrics:
# What Fassbinder film is it? The one-armed
# Man walks into a flower shop and says:
# What flower expresses
# Days go by
# And they just keep going by endlessly
# Pulling you
# Into the future.
# Days go by
# Endlessly
# Endlessly pulling you
# Into the future.
# And the florist says:
# White Lily.