Continued, Life A Love Story
Flo opens her refrigerator to contemplate what she might have for dinner.
Nothing looks too appealing. She decides she’ll just have cold cereal, something she likes a lot any time of day.
Her friend Barbara Fanning used to tell her, “Flo, if you keep eating that you’ll get big as a house; it’s well documented.
” Anything Barbara wanted you to believe she would tell you was well documented.
And if ever you got impatient and asked where it was well documented, she’d say, “Never mind.”
As she eats, Flo reads the community newspaper.
There’s a story about a cat in a nursing home that lies on the beds of the people there who allow it to.
Flo thinks it might be a comfort to have a cat on her bed.
She always wanted a cat, but Terrence didn’t like them.
“No cats!” he would say, and then he had to go and make a face when he said it, to boot.
Flo didn’t get mad at Terrence very often, but sometimes they would fight about the no-cat rule.
Well, Flo fixed him. She got porcelain cats and kept them on her dresser, a mother cat and two kittens.
Siamese. Those were her cats. The mother’s name was Tippy and the kittens were Spill and Chase.
A little kid might want those porcelain cats.
They could pretend they were pets same as she did.
Take them outside or bring them to school for show-and-tell.
A kid might break them but that’s all right, they would have gotten broken from being used, which is entirely different from when you accidentally knock something off a table and there it is, gone forever, and you stand there staring hard at the broken thing like a certain look could bring all the pieces back together.
Do they still have show-and-tell in school?
Flo wonders. She always liked seeing what other kids found interesting or special.
One time when it was show-and-tell in her fourth-grade classroom, she had forgotten to bring something.
So she took off her cardigan sweater, which had jewels at the shoulder, and when it was her turn she held it up and talked about it, told how her aunt had given it to her and it made her feel queenly.
Well, the boys didn’t care one whit, but some girls wanted to try that sweater on at recess. Flo was popular that day.
Schools do still have recess, at least. When Flo walks around the neighborhood, she passes an elementary school, and when it is recess time she always likes to watch and see what’s going on.
There’s an awful lot of this so-called technology that Flo finds mostly incomprehensible; she is not one of those modern older women wearing stylish sneakers and poking at a little telephone screen.
Everybody is poking at their screens except for animals!
Even toddlers. Not long ago, Flo saw a woman pushing a toddler in a carriage and they were both on their phones.
Flo had to stop walking and stare. And she knows other people’s business is not her business but heavens to Betsy.
One thing Flo likes about watching recess is that it’s still the same.
No technology out there, leastwise not yet.
Just kids hanging by their knees from the jungle gym or riding high on the swings, or big groups of kids chasing each other at breakneck speed and yelling their heads off, or maybe a couple of kids huddled together in the corner of the playground hatching a plot or pretending something.
Once she heard a little boy say, “Let’s play Army and have names.
I’ll be Colonel Bill Williams.” “Bill and William are the same thing,” said one of his friends, and the little boy said, “No they are not. One is Bill and one is William.”
In Flo’s opinion, pretending is awfully good for you.
It can lift you up and take you miles away from where you are.
And of course kids are natural actors, and don’t they become a cat, or a monster with seven eyes waving around on stalks, or a king in some made-up land.
Occasionally she sees a little kid alone, maybe wearing glasses with an elastic round the back of his head, maybe dragging a stick behind him.
Flo likes to chance talking to kids like that, leaning over the chain-link fence to holler yoo-hoo and ask how they’re doing.
She always wants to share some butterscotch candies from her purse with them but Lord knows you can’t do that anymore.
But she asks how they’re doing. And because they are children and have trust and willingness and honesty, they will usually tell her.
And mostly they are fine, just solitary beings who like to think their own thoughts.
Flo always thinks, Well, there’s another Steve Jobs coming up.