I love my job! I get to meet the most fascinating people all day every day. Yesterday, it was a little old lady with a halo of perfectly (and I mean perfectly) coiffed ringlets. She must have spent hours on her hair. Picture young Shirley Temple as an eighty-plus lady…. same hair.
Sharp as a button, she was, in her woven green coat. She looked like she had stepped straight out of a 50’s magazine. But this pint-sized dame showed me a thing or two! She’d been sewing all her life and wanted to know if she could buy the fabric instead of having the curtains made up for her. She knew what she wanted and brought samples of her sofa cover in to match the fabric.
Needless to say, she spouted feet and inches to me. My metric ‘everything-in-multiples-of-10’ brain objected in a scramble of numbers that spun dizzily. Not a problem to the genius I was talking to. She was never taught metric, but converted the measurements for me without skipping a beat! That was when she told me she’d retired 15 years ago from My Job! Yes… the very job I was doing! Back when Montgomery had concessions in the Co-op. I’d like to bet she could still do it and sweep me under the rug too. She turned down the offer to replace me, though, as she had a ‘little boy’, aged 90, back home she needed to care for.
I can only hope that I have a fraction of this lady’s spunk and wits when I’m her age. Grow old gracefully? That’s for dull folk!
