I leave the house because I’m tired of screens. I want to work with a pen in my hand. That callous on the inside knuckle of my middle finger needs improving.

I head for the library where I find some books waiting for me, one of which is Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings.

I am not allowed to read it. I’m supposed to be working.

I decide I can’t be trusted so take the books out to my car.

My car is parked down the street and in the back seat I notice a few things for the cleaner which is right there so I bundle them up and walk over.

The cleaner isn’t open even though the sign says 9 a.m. and it’s 9:30.

It occurs to me that I haven’t had breakfast so I walk to the deli, thoughts of a fresh Kaiser, unsalted butter and a splitch of shaved Black Forest Ham dancing in my head.

The door is unlocked but just as I open it I see the sign says 10 a.m. And it’s only 9:35. The woman behind the counter looks up, sort of smiles… the lights aren’t even on yet… and when I ask if they’re open she very sweetly says well, not really. I can tell she’d sell me something if pressed but would prefer not to. I used to work in a deli, I know enough to smile and say I’ll come back.

The cleaner is still not open at almost 9:40.

The Giant Tiger, however, is selling some banged up but still quite lovely hanging baskets of geraniums and something else for $5.

I drag three of them into the store [still carrying my bundle of un-cleaned cleaning]. The line to pay is unusually long but I’m just happy for a moment’s rest. I watch a woman admiring a sundress; she stretches it to see how wide it will go. Not wide enough apparently; she moves on. Another woman rifles through a rack of floor length, strapless, muumuu type things while her children run around in circles wielding pool noodles. It makes me sad to see that the girl wields a pink one and the boy, a blue. Part of me wants to speak to them, to introduce them to the joys of orange and yellow and green.

But it’s none of my business really and, anyway, the line is slowly moving after the lone cashier hollers for help. As I try to manoeuvre my unclean clothes, a notebook and three hanging baskets, the mother leans over and offers a hand. It occurs to me that this is my chance… I can thank her, then casually toss in something merry but subliminally message-filled about the controlling ways of retailers who sell far too many pink and blue products and do we really want to be so corralled in our choices? But the kids are hooting and waving their noodles and I doubt she’d even hear me so I just smile and thank her most sincerely and pretty soon it’s my turn to pay and when I leave I thank her again and she looks so frazzled with those pink and blue children running around, and she there, clutching a floral print muumuu. I hope it brings her some peace.

I clunk away with my three baskets, my bundle of clothes and my notebook [did I mention a water bottle?] and head back down the street to my car, cursing the dry cleaner the whole way. The deli is in the opposite direction. I have too much to carry to go back there. And I don’t feel like it anyway. So much for breakfast.

Then I remember the café at the library.

Perfect!

Except they have nothing I want. What I want is a fresh kaiser even though I should probably stick to non-gluten.

The world is obviously against me.

I almost leave but starvation dictates I stay. 

Turns out the banana bread is excellent. And the woman who is doing a bagel for so long I think she’s ignoring me, turns out to be awfully nice. Turns out she’s just doing a bagel. Probably a really good bagel too. Might have that next time. Screw gluten.

Back at the library I write for a while. Some good stuff. Some crap.

Later, heading back to the car, I see that the cleaner’s door is propped open.

I take my stuff in. I am not smiling. I am prepared to make a statement about signs in windows and punctuality in business and people having to trundle about the street and Giant Tiger with bundles of men’s trousers.

The woman speaks before I have a chance to say anything. In fact she even turns down the TV that is always on some station whose language I can’t understand. She has never turned the TV down before.

She says oh what a terrible morning she’s had, something about the bus and how she still had to do laundry and cook and something about her husband and her kid and she tries but there’s all the sewing [she does tailoring too] and the floors to wash and how it’s hard coming to a country with nothing and a different culture and her kid is studying so hard and her husband works so hard and he wants her to have nice nails, he tells her to get a manicure, or fake nails, he wants her to have nice things, but look!, she says, and holds out her hands. She says she works too hard to have nice nails. They’re short and ragged and painted pink but most of it has worn off. I tell her my parents were immigrants too, that they came here with a suitcase, nothing else, not even language. She says yes, just a suitcase. I don’t ask where she comes from and she doesn’t ask about my parents. It doesn’t matter in the slightest.

My dad used to want my mother to have nice nails. Something she could never quite manage. She just worked too damn hard to achieve that lofty goal. Haven’t thought of that in years.

I’ve been looking for a new cleaner ever since mine retired. I’ve been to this place a few times, but the TV always annoyed me and the woman seemed grumpy and sullen; before today she hardly ever spoke.

And she might go sullen again. Might leave the stupid TV blaring.

Still…

I think I’ll bring a bottle of really good quality, long-wearing pink nail polish next time I take in my stuff.

And I will smile.
The very bloody least I can do is smile.
Photo courtesy of WikiCommons

So I’m in the men’s sock department at Winners and this elderly woman keeps bumping into me and leaning across whatever I’m looking at until I say: sorry, am I in your way?  And she says “What do you think about these?” She holds up a three-pack. “I like the argyle,” she says, “but why do they have to put in the others?”  The others are big bold stripes and she’s not sure her neighbour who takes out the garbage for her will wear them. She gets him a little something every year. “It’s so hard to know what kind of socks someone will like,” she says.

She’s the picture of Santa’s wife. White hair, wire-rimmed glasses. Rosy cheeks. A beige anorak. Navy slacks.

She shows me a single pair she’s also considering, black with a tiny red line at the top, asks what I think and I tell her they’re classic, that no one would have a problem with them. She agrees, but keeps looking. I continue looking too. I say the bold patterns make the most sense, easier to match them up. She laughs, says yes, but easier still is to buy all the same kind, which is what she did for her husband. Dozens of the same plain black, she says. Never a problem making pairs. She tells me she’d wait until he was down to one or two then fill the washer with only socks, every one of them turned inside out.

“That way they don’t get fuzzy from other things, or all pilly.”

It all seems a bit too much work, I say, all that turning inside out and back again and she says pooh, it’s no trouble, you just pile them on the chesterfield and sit down and go at it for a few minutes.

I tell her I’m not actually very fond of socks, the sheer number of them and the way they take it upon themselves to disappear one day, turn up weeks later or not at all. But mostly I really hate sorting them.

Something changes in her face, she goes quiet. Her eyes are blue. She looks at me through her Mrs. Claus glasses and I have an idea of what’s coming.

“I’d give anything to sort my husband’s socks again,” she says, then turns her head.

She tries to smile, shrugs, ruffles through the display as she tells me he died three months ago, that the family’s coming together and she can’t let herself get sad because they’re coming from Nova Scotia and Kingston and there’s the grandchildren to think of. She stops, looks up again. “But…” she says, and her sweet blue eyes are suddenly red-rimmed and we’re standing there in the socks and her lips are trembling—and I put my hand on her arm and I say, “But it’ll be hard.”

And she nods. Composes herself and we each say this and that and eventually laugh a little and then goodbye and the whole time I want to hug her but we’re in the socks at Winners and I have the feeling she’d rather not make a big thing of this, that she’s doing the best she can.

When I leave her she’s still debating about the argyle/stripes combo or the single classic black.

I buy a couple of three-packs.

Count my blessings.