A Cappella

A 75 year old woman decides to change herself, then lives to regret it.

                                 

A Cappella

  

You are a child of the universe 

no less than the trees and the stars;

you have a right to be here

And whether or not it is clear to you, 

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should

Desiderata

MaxEhrman

I yam what I yam

                     Popeye

Society isn't a bunch of loud voices all trying to be heard, it's a choir trying to sing in harmony.

Gillian Scott

                                 

                                                              Mary

Why would a little old lady wake up on her 75th birthday and decide to make a new woman of herself? Well, in the case of Mary Ryan, it’s complicated. On the one hand, she’d spent her life being what the literature describes as a “people pleaser,” as if that’s a bad thing. But to Mary it wasn’t a bad thing. She was, and is, a genuinely nice person - all she ever wanted was for everyone around her to be happy. The thought of hurting anybody's feelings made her sick at heart. But you can't be nice all the time without being a phony at least some of the time. And that's her problem. Too often in her life she'd found herself doing things she didn't really want to do, appearing to have opinions she didn't really have, just to please other people. After a day of putting on an act, she would sometimes lie in bed and squirm. And the older she got, the more out of step with the world around her she became, so the more pretending she had to do. 

Things really came to a head about a week before her birthday. Mary lives in a small town in eastern Canada, in a Retirement Community called Sunrise Village. The developers  had originally called it Sunset Village until the insensitivity of that name was pointed out to them. The community consists of rows of bungalows in two crescents placed next to each other to form an "m" shape. Many of the residents liked to walk, bike, or in one case, run the crescents on a daily basis. Some of them would meet at the coffee shop at the end of the road. One morning, after her walk, Mary was sitting there with a neighbour, Sheila Jenkins, when Colette, another woman from the village, came in and spoke to Sheila.

"Fancy a trip to the quilt show over in the West End? I'm just on my way there, but my car won't start."

Sheila couldn’t go, because she had a dental appointment, so Mary volunteered to take Colette instead. She has little or no interest in quilts, but she volunteered readily enough. Not just out of niceness, but, living by herself since her husband died, she finds it hard to fill up all the hours in a day. Within half an hour, she and Colette were walking round at the show admiring quilts. Colette does some quilting herself, so her enthusiasm was understandable, but the finer details of the cutting and stitching were lost on Mary. It seemed like a lot of work. And after the first six or seven, what little interest she had was disappearing fast. Not that she gave any hint of that. Not wanting to spoil Colette's enjoyment of the show, she did her best to match her enthusiasm. Matched it too well, as it turns out.

The show was being sponsored by a bus tour company which was trying out a new trip to quilt shows in Nova Scotia. They had donated a door prize of two tickets, and when they did the draw, Colette had the winning ticket. She was delighted, and Mary was pleased for her, but then....

Colette saw Mary's shining face smiling up at her and couldn't help herself.

"Of course, you'll have to come with me. We'll have a ball."

Mary's heart sank. A week going round quilt shows was the last thing she wanted. She could have easily gotten out of it. All she had to do was say that the trip would be wasted on her, and Colette should take somebody who knew more about quilting. That's all she had to do. But that thought didn’t occur to her till afterwards.

"Oh, that would be lovely," she said.

Mary went home in a turmoil. Here she was, nearly 75 years old, and she had just agreed to spend a week pretending to be interested in quilts. It would be exhausting. In the days before her birthday, she did a lot of soul searching. She wasn’t happy with herself, and the root of the problem seemed to be she wasn’t honest about who she was. So, on the morning of her birthday, before she got out of bed, Mary determined she was going to change. She was finished hiding from the world; she was going to be honest with people; she was going to do the things that she wanted to do; she was going to get out of that trip to Nova Scotia.

It didn't take long for her resolve to be tested. On her walk round the crescents that morning she came across a neighbour Bernice deadheading her flowers.

 

"Don't you just love Zinnias?" said Bernice, looking fondly at the mass of colour between her and Mary. It has to be said, this was probably a rhetorical question. Mary didn't really need to answer. She could have just made a comment about the weather. But no, she had resolved to be honest, and honest she would be.

"They aren't my favourite flower," she said. "Too prim and proper. They remind me of little old Victorian spinsters sitting around having afternoon tea, complaining about the untidy neighbours."

Bernice's face reddened. That was the first clue. She straightened up, stiffened, and looked coldly at Mary.

"Well I'm sure you don't have to look if they offend you so much." she said, and turned and stomped into the house.

Mary could only watch her in dismay. Heartsick, she carried on her walk, her stomach in a knot, her mind in chaos. This is what happens when you say what you think.  By the time she got to the bottom of the road, she'd given up all ambition to be a more honest person, and resigned herself to a week feigning enthusiasm about bloody quilts.

  

                                  Bernice, Bob and Sheila

Bernice's reaction to Mary wasn't out of character. She's notoriously thin skinned, which Mary hadn't found out before because she'd always agreed with her. The merest perceived slight - a glance, a tone of voice, a wrong word, sets her off. She blames it on the time in high school when she was about to walk into a classroom and she heard someone say "Oh, I don't know, I quite like Bernice." The implications of that remark are hurtful it's true, but she was prickly before that. It just made her more vigilant that's all.

As soon as she came into the house after her encounter with Mary her husband Bob recognised the symptoms. She was in a snit and it would take her all afternoon to get out of it. At times like these, Bob found the best thing to do was get out of the way. He hurriedly closed his laptop and stood up.

 

"I've got to go help Fred put new steps on his deck."

"Mary Ryan just told me my garden reminds her of a bunch of old spinsters."

"What?"

"She said the Zinnias look like a bunch of old ladies criticizing the neighbours."

"Sounds like she's the old lady criticizing her neighbours. Listen. I have to go, shouldn't be too long. With any luck Fred's nearly finished by now."

Bob threw on his work shoes and hustled out the door. He hadn't meant to go over to Fred's so soon. Fred prided himself on being a handyman, but the thing he was best at was getting other people to do things for him. Instead of cutting across the back, he decided to take the long way round. When he got to the end of the crescent he noticed Sheila Jenkins by her car changing a tire. She was struggling with one of the nuts. A perfect excuse for being late going to Fred's presented itself. He dashed over to the car.

"Here, let me do that," he said, nearly pushing Sheila out of the way.

Sheila is a woman with a strong streak of independence. In fact you could say she suffers from an excess of it. She considers asking anyone for help a sign of weakness. She had been changing her own tires for the last forty years, ever since the moment of her Great Humiliation. That happened when she was in Kenya, helping out at a dairy farm owned by the family of a friend from agricultural college. The family had gone off for a few days to a funeral, leaving Sheila in charge - but since the local men did all the work, being in charge didn't amount to much. But one of the men came back from delivering milk to a nearby coffee plantation with his face swollen and bruised. Turns out the plantation owner had punched him in the face when he dropped a crate of milk. Sheila was livid. She jumped in the truck and drove over to give the man a piece of her mind. The image of his fat red face laughing at her as she tried to tell him off has never left her. But worse was to come. Before she'd driven out of his driveway she got a flat tire. In her short life Sheila had never had any occasion to change a tire, so she had to go and ask the man for help. Standing there watching one of his workers change her tire, with that obnoxious boor next to her, not even bothering to disguise the self-satisfied smirk on his face, was the most humiliating experience Sheila was to ever go through in her life.

 

Since that day on, she made it her business to know how to do everything she was likely to come across, from repairing machines to plumbing and wiring a house. Now here she was having to stand like a helpless female and watch Bob fumble around because he presumably thought he was better at it than her. On top of that, she would have to pretend to be grateful. She was so upset that when Bob eventually finished she jumped in her car and drove to the tire store, completely forgetting she was supposed to be having coffee with Colette that afternoon.

While Bob was "helping" Sheila, Bernice was at home stewing. First Mary Ryan insults her, then her husband can't take the time to listen to her and give her some sympathy. So she did the only thing she knew to make herself feel better - jumped in the car and went shopping. Of course at the bottom of the road she came across the sight of Bob changing Sheila's tire. Her husband, who didn't have the time for her, suddenly had time to help out a neighbour. She slowed the car down and gave them a look that was at the same time ice-cold with contempt and red-hot with fury. Fortunately, neither Bob nor Sheila noticed Bernice's car, so they didn't see the look she gave them.

At the store Bernice took a while to find something to put her in a better mood, but eventually she found a cookie jar in the shape of a rabbit with a hat on. She knew Bob would hate it, so she grabbed it, enjoying a laugh with the woman at the check-out, and then treated herself to a cup of coffee and muffin. She was just finishing her coffee and about ready to leave, when Sheila appeared at her table with a cup in her hand and asked if she could join her.

"I'm just waiting for a flat tire to be fixed," Sheila said. "Might take a while."

"Oh yes. I saw Bob helping you with your car."

"Right. Don't ask me why. He didn't seem to know much about changing tires, but he had to stop and do it for me."

Bernice bristled. It was one thing for her to criticise her husband, but she couldn't let anybody else get away with doing it.

"He was just trying to be a good neighbour. Help out."

"Why did he think I needed....Oh, silly me. I forgot. Everybody knows you need a Y chromosome to change a tire," She rolled her eyes to the heavens. "Guys."

 

At this point Sheila launched into one of her rants about the male sex, forgetting that this particular male was the husband of her listener. But Bernice wasn't in any mood to sit and listen to her husband being ridiculed. She stood up, gathered her cookie jar in the shape of a rabbit under her arm, and marched out without another word .

"Shoot. Me and my big mouth. I've done it again." Sheila muttered. She could have hit herself. "I'll be getting the cold shoulder for weeks."

She was right about that. The next morning at cards in the local community room Bernice came in, looked at Sheila sitting in her usual place, froze her with a look and went over to another table, although she usually sat with Sheila and her regulars. As it happened, the only empty chair was next to Mary Ryan. Choosing the lesser of two evils, she smiled at Mary as she sat down. Mary was surprised, and, it has to be said, pathetically grateful to be in Bernice’s good books so soon. Poor Sheila was left squirming. 

                                           Colette

If you were to describe Colette you'd probably say she was one of those people who are comfortable in their own skin. Maybe it's thanks to her parents who, when she failed a math test at school, told her "OK so you're no good at math. We still love you." They also took care to impress on her that being good at spelling didn't make her any more loveable than somebody who wasn't. Whatever the reason, Colette grew up to be a woman at ease with herself and with everybody else. So it was quite natural that when Sheila wanted to talk to somebody about the situation with Bernice she went to Colette.

“Well, I can tell you what a mature, emotionally healthy person would do,” Colette said after Sheila had told her the story. “But you won’t like it.”

“Oh. Go on tell me,” sighed Sheila. 

“Go to Bernice and apologise of course.”

“You’re right. I don’t like it. Am I at fault then? I mean, Bob was patronising me. Big man helping little woman.”

“You were struggling with a nut when he came over. Would you have managed to get it off by yourself?”

“I’m not sure. Oh, all right, I was a bit ungrateful. But Bernice giving me the evil eye and the silent treatment is just pure bullying. If I apologise to her, she’ll have won.”

“No way,” said Colette with a sly grin, “if two people are in the wrong, then the one that apologises first has the moral high ground. Bernice will be deflated. Especially if you tell her about that plantation guy in Africa. Lay it on thick”

“That’s wicked.”

“Too late for sainthood now.”

At which point, the two women broke into unseemly giggles, and Sheila went off to make amends with Bernice.

Colette had almost managed to restore order to the universe. But she had one more task to do. On the day of the flat tire, Sheila had called from the tire store and told her she wouldn’t be coming for coffee. Colette hadn’t gone to much trouble, but she had made one of her famous upside-down cakes. Not wanting to waste it she went to her neighbour Sandra, who had just moved in, and asked her over. That encounter gave Colette food for thought, and set a plan forming in her head.  Her mind made up, she invited Mary over for coffee. Yes, that Mary who had started all the trouble.

"I've just met our new neighbour, Sandra," she said casually, "real nice woman."

"Oh good," said Mary, "does she play cards?"

"No, but she does a bit of quilting. Sad story though."

"What's that?"

"About a year ago, her husband and son were killed in a car accident."

"Oh Colette! That poor woman. What can we do for her?"

"Just show her friendship I guess."

"She's a quilter you say. Do you think she'd like to go on that trip to Nova Scotia?"

"I'm sure she'd love it."

"Then you'll have to give her my ticket. Give her something to look forward to.”

     

Mary was pleased to escape the trip - of course she was. But it wasn’t as big a deal as you might think. After the episode with Bernice she’d had a long talk with herself. She realised she didn’t actually like the person she’d been trying to turn herself into. So what would she gain by being more honest? Better to put up with sometimes being a phony - it was always with the best of intentions after all. And if she wanted to get out of things she didn’t want to do, she had to become less honest, not more. She needed to get better at coming up with a few white lies. At her age a few more ailments would be plausible. If she couldn’t think of something quickly enough, then doing something like looking at quilts for a week was a small price to pay. So she had resigned herself to the trip, but nevertheless was quite happy to get out of it. 

On the way home from Colette’s, Mary got to thinking just how well things had turned out. If she hadn’t accepted the trip, Colette would have given the ticket to somebody who really wanted to go, and Sandra might have missed out on a much needed treat. The thought made her feel even better. Once inside the house, Mary was in the mood for some music. She went through her collection, and picked out a CD by Crosby, Stills and Nash. It seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

                                 

erself into. So what would she gain by being more honest? Better to put up with sometimes being a phony - it was always with the best of intentions after all. And if she wanted to get out of things she didn’t want to do, she had to become less honest, not more. She needed to get better at coming up with a few white lies. At her age a few more ailments would be plausible. If she couldn’t think of something quickly enough, then doing something like looking at quilts for a week was a small price to pay. So she had resigned herself to the trip, but nevertheless was quite happy to get out of it. 

On the way home from Colette’s, Mary got to thinking just how well things had turned out. If she hadn’t accepted the trip, Colette would have given the ticket to somebody who really wanted to go, and Sandra might have missed out on a much needed treat. The thought made her feel even better. Once inside the house, Mary was in the mood for some music. She went through her collection, and picked out a CD by Crosby, Stills and Nash. It seemed to fit the bill perfectly. 

A Cappella

  

You are a child of the universe 

no less than the trees and the stars;

you have a right to be here

And whether or not it is clear to you, 

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should

Desiderata

Max Ehrmann

I yam what I yam

                    Popeye

Mary

Why would a little old lady wake up on her 75th birthday and decide to make a new woman of herself? Well, in the case of Mary Ryan, it’s complicated. On the one hand, she’d spent her life being what the literature describes as a “people pleaser,” as if that’s a bad thing. But to Mary it wasn’t a bad thing. She was, and is, a genuinely nice person - all she ever wanted was for everyone around her to be happy. The thought of hurting anybody's feelings made her sick at heart. But you can't be nice all the time without being a phony at least some of the time. And that's her problem. Too often in her life she'd found herself doing things she didn't really want to do, appearing to have opinions she didn't really have, just to please other people. After a day of putting on an act, she would sometimes lie in bed and squirm. And the older she got, the more out of step with the world around her she became, so the more pretending she had to do. 

Things really came to a head about a week before her birthday. Mary lives in a small town in eastern Canada, in a Retirement Community called Sunrise Village. The developers  had originally called it Sunset Village until the insensitivity of that name was pointed out to them. The community consists of rows of bungalows in two crescents placed next to each other to form an "m" shape. Many of the residents liked to walk, bike, or in one case, run the crescents on a daily basis. Some of them would meet at the coffee shop at the end of the road. One morning, after her walk, Mary was sitting there with a neighbour, Sheila Jenkins, when Colette, another woman from the village, came in and spoke to Sheila.

"Fancy a trip to the quilt show over in the West End? I'm just on my way there, but my car won't start."

Sheila couldn’t go, because she had a dental appointment, so Mary volunteered to take Colette instead. She has little or no interest in quilts, but she volunteered readily enough. Not just out of niceness, but, living by herself since her husband died, she finds it hard to fill up all the hours in a day. Within half an hour, she and Colette were walking round at the show admiring quilts. Colette does some quilting herself, so her enthusiasm was understandable, but the finer details of the cutting and stitching were lost on Mary. It seemed like a lot of work. And after the first six or seven, what little interest she had was disappearing fast. Not that she gave any hint of that. Not wanting to spoil Colette's enjoyment of the show, she did her best to match her enthusiasm. Matched it too well, as it turns out.

The show was being sponsored by a bus tour company which was trying out a new trip to quilt shows in Nova Scotia. They had donated a door prize of two tickets, and when they did the draw, Colette had the winning ticket. She was delighted, and Mary was pleased for her, but then....

Colette saw Mary's shining face smiling up at her and couldn't help herself.

"Of course, you'll have to come with me. We'll have a ball."

Mary's heart sank. A week going round quilt shows was the last thing she wanted. She could have easily gotten out of it. All she had to do was say that the trip would be wasted on her, and Colette should take somebody who knew more about quilting. That's all she had to do. But that thought didn’t occur to her till afterwards.

"Oh, that would be lovely," she said.

Mary went home in a turmoil. Here she was, nearly 75 years old, and she had just agreed to spend a week pretending to be interested in quilts. It would be exhausting. In the days before her birthday, she did a lot of soul searching. She wasn’t happy with herself, and the root of the problem seemed to be she wasn’t honest about who she was. So, on the morning of her birthday, before she got out of bed, Mary determined she was going to change. She was finished hiding from the world; she was going to be honest with people; she was going to do the things that she wanted to do; she was going to get out of that trip to Nova Scotia.

It didn't take long for her resolve to be tested. On her walk round the crescents that morning she came across a neighbour Bernice deadheading her flowers. 

"Don't you just love Zinnias?" said Bernice, looking fondly at the mass of colour between her and Mary. It has to be said, this was probably a rhetorical question. Mary didn't really need to answer. She could have just made a comment about the weather. But no, she had resolved to be honest, and honest she would be.

"They aren't my favourite flower," she said. "Too prim and proper. They remind me of little old Victorian spinsters sitting around having afternoon tea, complaining about the untidy neighbours."

Bernice's face reddened. That was the first clue. She straightened up, stiffened, and looked coldly at Mary.

"Well I'm sure you don't have to look if they offend you so much." she said, and turned and stomped into the house.

Mary could only watch her in dismay. Heartsick, she carried on her walk, her stomach in a knot, her mind in chaos. This is what happens when you say what you think.  By the time she got to the bottom of the road, she'd given up all ambition to be a more honest person, and resigned herself to a week feigning enthusiasm about bloody quilts.

Bernice, Bob and Sheila

Bernice's reaction to Mary wasn't out of character. She's notoriously thin skinned, which Mary hadn't found out before because she'd always agreed with her. The merest perceived slight - a glance, a tone of voice, a wrong word, sets her off. She blames it on the time in high school when she was about to walk into a classroom and she heard someone say "Oh, I don't know, I quite like Bernice." The implications of that remark are hurtful it's true, but she was prickly before that. It just made her more vigilant that's all.

As soon as she came into the house after her encounter with Mary her husband Bob recognised the symptoms. She was in a snit and it would take her all afternoon to get out of it. At times like these, Bob found the best thing to do was get out of the way. He hurriedly closed his laptop and stood up. 

"I've got to go help Fred put new steps on his deck."

"Mary Ryan just told me my garden reminds her of a bunch of old spinsters."

"What?"

"She said the Zinnias look like a bunch of old ladies criticizing the neighbours."

"Sounds like she's the old lady criticizing her neighbours. Listen. I have to go, shouldn't be too long. With any luck Fred's nearly finished by now."

Bob threw on his work shoes and hustled out the door. He hadn't meant to go over to Fred's so soon. Fred prided himself on being a handyman, but the thing he was best at was getting other people to do things for him. Instead of cutting across the back, he decided to take the long way round. When he got to the end of the crescent he noticed Sheila Jenkins by her car changing a tire. She was struggling with one of the nuts. A perfect excuse for being late going to Fred's presented itself. He dashed over to the car.

"Here, let me do that," he said, nearly pushing Sheila out of the way.

Sheila is a woman with a strong streak of independence. In fact you could say she suffers from an excess of it. She considers asking anyone for help a sign of weakness. She had been changing her own tires for the last forty years, ever since the moment of her Great Humiliation. That happened when she was in Kenya, helping out at a dairy farm owned by the family of a friend from agricultural college. The family had gone off for a few days to a funeral, leaving Sheila in charge - but since the local men did all the work, being in charge didn't amount to much. But one of the men came back from delivering milk to a nearby coffee plantation with his face swollen and bruised. Turns out the plantation owner had punched him in the face when he dropped a crate of milk. Sheila was livid. She jumped in the truck and drove over to give the man a piece of her mind. The image of his fat red face laughing at her as she tried to tell him off has never left her. But worse was to come. Before she'd driven out of his driveway she got a flat tire. In her short life Sheila had never had any occasion to change a tire, so she had to go and ask the man for help. Standing there watching one of his workers change her tire, with that obnoxious boor next to her, not even bothering to disguise the self-satisfied smirk on his face, was the most humiliating experience Sheila was to ever go through in her life. 

Since that day on, she made it her business to know how to do everything she was likely to come across, from repairing machines to plumbing and wiring a house. Now here she was having to stand like a helpless female and watch Bob fumble around because he presumably thought he was better at it than her. On top of that, she would have to pretend to be grateful. She was so upset that when Bob eventually finished she jumped in her car and drove to the tire store, completely forgetting she was supposed to be having coffee with Colette that afternoon.

While Bob was "helping" Sheila, Bernice was at home stewing. First Mary Ryan insults her, then her husband can't take the time to listen to her and give her some sympathy. So she did the only thing she knew to make herself feel better - jumped in the car and went shopping. Of course at the bottom of the road she came across the sight of Bob changing Sheila's tire. Her husband, who didn't have the time for her, suddenly had time to help out a neighbour. She slowed the car down and gave them a look that was at the same time ice-cold with contempt and red-hot with fury. Fortunately, neither Bob nor Sheila noticed Bernice's car, so they didn't see the look she gave them.

At the store Bernice took a while to find something to put her in a better mood, but eventually she found a cookie jar in the shape of a rabbit with a hat on. She knew Bob would hate it, so she grabbed it, enjoying a laugh with the woman at the check-out, and then treated herself to a cup of coffee and muffin. She was just finishing her coffee and about ready to leave, when Sheila appeared at her table with a cup in her hand and asked if she could join her.

"I'm just waiting for a flat tire to be fixed," Sheila said. "Might take a while."

"Oh yes. I saw Bob helping you with your car."

"Right. Don't ask me why. He didn't seem to know much about changing tires, but he had to stop and do it for me."

Bernice bristled. It was one thing for her to criticise her husband, but she couldn't let anybody else get away with doing it.

"He was just trying to be a good neighbour. Help out."

"Why did he think I needed....Oh, silly me. I forgot. Everybody knows you need a Y chromosome to change a tire," She rolled her eyes to the heavens. "Guys." 

At this point Sheila launched into one of her rants about the male sex, forgetting that this particular male was the husband of her listener. But Bernice wasn't in any mood to sit and listen to her husband being ridiculed. She stood up, gathered her cookie jar in the shape of a rabbit under her arm, and marched out without another word .

"Shoot. Me and my big mouth. I've done it again." Sheila muttered. She could have hit herself. "I'll be getting the cold shoulder for weeks."

She was right about that. The next morning at cards in the local community room Bernice came in, looked at Sheila sitting in her usual place, froze her with a look and went over to another table, although she usually sat with Sheila and her regulars. As it happened, the only empty chair was next to Mary Ryan. Choosing the lesser of two evils, she smiled at Mary as she sat down. Mary was surprised, and, it has to be said, pathetically grateful to be in Bernice’s good books so soon. Poor Sheila was left squirming. 

          Colette

If you were to describe Colette you'd probably say she was one of those people who are comfortable in their own skin. Maybe it's thanks to her parents who, when she failed a math test at school, told her "OK so you're no good at math. We still love you." They also took care to impress on her that being good at spelling didn't make her any more loveable than somebody who wasn't. Whatever the reason, Colette grew up to be a woman at ease with herself and with everybody else. So it was quite natural that when Sheila wanted to talk to somebody about the situation with Bernice she went to Colette.

“Well, I can tell you what a mature, emotionally healthy person would do,” Colette said after Sheila had told her the story. “But you won’t like it.”

“Oh. Go on tell me,” sighed Sheila. 

“Go to Bernice and apologise of course.”

“You’re right. I don’t like it. Am I at fault then? I mean, Bob was patronising me. Big man helping little woman.”

“You were struggling with a nut when he came over. Would you have managed to get it off by yourself?”

“I’m not sure. Oh, all right, I was a bit ungrateful. But Bernice giving me the evil eye and the silent treatment is just pure bullying. If I apologise to her, she’ll have won.”

“No way,” said Colette with a sly grin, “if two people are in the wrong, then the one that apologises first has the moral high ground. Bernice will be deflated. Especially if you tell her about that plantation guy in Africa. Lay it on thick”

“That’s wicked.”

“Too late for sainthood now.”

At which point, the two women broke into unseemly giggles, and Sheila went off to make amends with Bernice.

Colette had almost managed to restore order to the universe. But she had one more task to do. On the day of the flat tire, Sheila had called from the tire store and told her she wouldn’t be coming for coffee. Colette hadn’t gone to much trouble, but she had made one of her famous upside-down cakes. Not wanting to waste it she went to her neighbour Sandra, who had just moved in, and asked her over. That encounter gave Colette food for thought, and set a plan forming in her head.  Her mind made up, she invited Mary over for coffee. Yes, that Mary who had started all the trouble.

"I've just met our new neighbour, Sandra," she said casually, "real nice woman."

"Oh good," said Mary, "does she play cards?"

"No, but she does a bit of quilting. Sad story though."

"What's that?"

"About a year ago, her husband and son were killed in a car accident."

"Oh Colette! That poor woman. What can we do for her?"

"Just show her friendship I guess."

"She's a quilter you say. Do you think she'd like to go on that trip to Nova Scotia?"

"I'm sure she'd love it."

"Then you'll have to give her my ticket. Give her something to look forward to.”     

Mary was pleased to escape the trip - of course she was. But it wasn’t as big a deal as you might think. After the episode with Bernice she’d had a long talk with herself. She realised she didn’t actually like the person she’d been trying to turn herself into. So what would she gain by being more honest? Better to put up with sometimes being a phony - it was always with the best of intentions after all. And if she wanted to get out of things she didn’t want to do, she had to become less honest, not more. She needed to get better at coming up with a few white lies. At her age a few more ailments would be plausible. If she couldn’t think of something quickly enough, then doing something like looking at quilts for a week was a small price to pay. So she had resigned herself to the trip, but nevertheless was quite happy to get out of it. 

On the way home from Colette’s, Mary got to thinking just how well things had turned out. If she hadn’t accepted the trip, Colette would have given the ticket to somebody who really wanted to go, and Sandra might have missed out on a much needed treat. The thought made her feel even better. Once inside the house, Mary was in the mood for some music. She went through her collection, and picked out a CD by Crosby, Stills and Nash. It seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

                                 

A Cappella

  

You are a child of the universe 

no less than the trees and the stars;

you have a right to be here

And whether or not it is clear to you, 

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should

Desiderata

Max Ehrmann

I yam what I yam

                    Popeye

Mary

Why would a little old lady wake up on her 75th birthday and decide to make a new woman of herself? Well, in the case of Mary Ryan, it’s complicated. On the one hand, she’d spent her life being what the literature describes as a “people pleaser,” as if that’s a bad thing. But to Mary it wasn’t a bad thing. She was, and is, a genuinely nice person - all she ever wanted was for everyone around her to be happy. The thought of hurting anybody's feelings made her sick at heart. But you can't be nice all the time without being a phony at least some of the time. And that's her problem. Too often in her life she'd found herself doing things she didn't really want to do, appearing to have opinions she didn't really have, just to please other people. After a day of putting on an act, she would sometimes lie in bed and squirm. And the older she got, the more out of step with the world around her she became, so the more pretending she had to do. 

Things really came to a head about a week before her birthday. Mary lives in a small town in eastern Canada, in a Retirement Community called Sunrise Village. The developers  had originally called it Sunset Village until the insensitivity of that name was pointed out to them. The community consists of rows of bungalows in two crescents placed next to each other to form an "m" shape. Many of the residents liked to walk, bike, or in one case, run the crescents on a daily basis. Some of them would meet at the coffee shop at the end of the road. One morning, after her walk, Mary was sitting there with a neighbour, Sheila Jenkins, when Colette, another woman from the village, came in and spoke to Sheila.

"Fancy a trip to the quilt show over in the West End? I'm just on my way there, but my car won't start."

Sheila couldn’t go, because she had a dental appointment, so Mary volunteered to take Colette instead. She has little or no interest in quilts, but she volunteered readily enough. Not just out of niceness, but, living by herself since her husband died, she finds it hard to fill up all the hours in a day. Within half an hour, she and Colette were walking round at the show admiring quilts. Colette does some quilting herself, so her enthusiasm was understandable, but the finer details of the cutting and stitching were lost on Mary. It seemed like a lot of work. And after the first six or seven, what little interest she had was disappearing fast. Not that she gave any hint of that. Not wanting to spoil Colette's enjoyment of the show, she did her best to match her enthusiasm. Matched it too well, as it turns out.

The show was being sponsored by a bus tour company which was trying out a new trip to quilt shows in Nova Scotia. They had donated a door prize of two tickets, and when they did the draw, Colette had the winning ticket. She was delighted, and Mary was pleased for her, but then....

Colette saw Mary's shining face smiling up at her and couldn't help herself.

"Of course, you'll have to come with me. We'll have a ball."

Mary's heart sank. A week going round quilt shows was the last thing she wanted. She could have easily gotten out of it. All she had to do was say that the trip would be wasted on her, and Colette should take somebody who knew more about quilting. That's all she had to do. But that thought didn’t occur to her till afterwards.

"Oh, that would be lovely," she said.

Mary went home in a turmoil. Here she was, nearly 75 years old, and she had just agreed to spend a week pretending to be interested in quilts. It would be exhausting. In the days before her birthday, she did a lot of soul searching. She wasn’t happy with herself, and the root of the problem seemed to be she wasn’t honest about who she was. So, on the morning of her birthday, before she got out of bed, Mary determined she was going to change. She was finished hiding from the world; she was going to be honest with people; she was going to do the things that she wanted to do; she was going to get out of that trip to Nova Scotia.

It didn't take long for her resolve to be tested. On her walk round the crescents that morning she came across a neighbour Bernice deadheading her flowers. 

"Don't you just love Zinnias?" said Bernice, looking fondly at the mass of colour between her and Mary. It has to be said, this was probably a rhetorical question. Mary didn't really need to answer. She could have just made a comment about the weather. But no, she had resolved to be honest, and honest she would be.

"They aren't my favourite flower," she said. "Too prim and proper. They remind me of little old Victorian spinsters sitting around having afternoon tea, complaining about the untidy neighbours."

Bernice's face reddened. That was the first clue. She straightened up, stiffened, and looked coldly at Mary.

"Well I'm sure you don't have to look if they offend you so much." she said, and turned and stomped into the house.

Mary could only watch her in dismay. Heartsick, she carried on her walk, her stomach in a knot, her mind in chaos. This is what happens when you say what you think.  By the time she got to the bottom of the road, she'd given up all ambition to be a more honest person, and resigned herself to a week feigning enthusiasm about bloody quilts.

Bernice, Bob and Sheila

Bernice's reaction to Mary wasn't out of character. She's notoriously thin skinned, which Mary hadn't found out before because she'd always agreed with her. The merest perceived slight - a glance, a tone of voice, a wrong word, sets her off. She blames it on the time in high school when she was about to walk into a classroom and she heard someone say "Oh, I don't know, I quite like Bernice." The implications of that remark are hurtful it's true, but she was prickly before that. It just made her more vigilant that's all.

As soon as she came into the house after her encounter with Mary her husband Bob recognised the symptoms. She was in a snit and it would take her all afternoon to get out of it. At times like these, Bob found the best thing to do was get out of the way. He hurriedly closed his laptop and stood up. 

"I've got to go help Fred put new steps on his deck."

"Mary Ryan just told me my garden reminds her of a bunch of old spinsters."

"What?"

"She said the Zinnias look like a bunch of old ladies criticizing the neighbours."

"Sounds like she's the old lady criticizing her neighbours. Listen. I have to go, shouldn't be too long. With any luck Fred's nearly finished by now."

Bob threw on his work shoes and hustled out the door. He hadn't meant to go over to Fred's so soon. Fred prided himself on being a handyman, but the thing he was best at was getting other people to do things for him. Instead of cutting across the back, he decided to take the long way round. When he got to the end of the crescent he noticed Sheila Jenkins by her car changing a tire. She was struggling with one of the nuts. A perfect excuse for being late going to Fred's presented itself. He dashed over to the car.

"Here, let me do that," he said, nearly pushing Sheila out of the way.

Sheila is a woman with a strong streak of independence. In fact you could say she suffers from an excess of it. She considers asking anyone for help a sign of weakness. She had been changing her own tires for the last forty years, ever since the moment of her Great Humiliation. That happened when she was in Kenya, helping out at a dairy farm owned by the family of a friend from agricultural college. The family had gone off for a few days to a funeral, leaving Sheila in charge - but since the local men did all the work, being in charge didn't amount to much. But one of the men came back from delivering milk to a nearby coffee plantation with his face swollen and bruised. Turns out the plantation owner had punched him in the face when he dropped a crate of milk. Sheila was livid. She jumped in the truck and drove over to give the man a piece of her mind. The image of his fat red face laughing at her as she tried to tell him off has never left her. But worse was to come. Before she'd driven out of his driveway she got a flat tire. In her short life Sheila had never had any occasion to change a tire, so she had to go and ask the man for help. Standing there watching one of his workers change her tire, with that obnoxious boor next to her, not even bothering to disguise the self-satisfied smirk on his face, was the most humiliating experience Sheila was to ever go through in her life. 

Since that day on, she made it her business to know how to do everything she was likely to come across, from repairing machines to plumbing and wiring a house. Now here she was having to stand like a helpless female and watch Bob fumble around because he presumably thought he was better at it than her. On top of that, she would have to pretend to be grateful. She was so upset that when Bob eventually finished she jumped in her car and drove to the tire store, completely forgetting she was supposed to be having coffee with Colette that afternoon.

While Bob was "helping" Sheila, Bernice was at home stewing. First Mary Ryan insults her, then her husband can't take the time to listen to her and give her some sympathy. So she did the only thing she knew to make herself feel better - jumped in the car and went shopping. Of course at the bottom of the road she came across the sight of Bob changing Sheila's tire. Her husband, who didn't have the time for her, suddenly had time to help out a neighbour. She slowed the car down and gave them a look that was at the same time ice-cold with contempt and red-hot with fury. Fortunately, neither Bob nor Sheila noticed Bernice's car, so they didn't see the look she gave them.

At the store Bernice took a while to find something to put her in a better mood, but eventually she found a cookie jar in the shape of a rabbit with a hat on. She knew Bob would hate it, so she grabbed it, enjoying a laugh with the woman at the check-out, and then treated herself to a cup of coffee and muffin. She was just finishing her coffee and about ready to leave, when Sheila appeared at her table with a cup in her hand and asked if she could join her.

"I'm just waiting for a flat tire to be fixed," Sheila said. "Might take a while."

"Oh yes. I saw Bob helping you with your car."

"Right. Don't ask me why. He didn't seem to know much about changing tires, but he had to stop and do it for me."

Bernice bristled. It was one thing for her to criticise her husband, but she couldn't let anybody else get away with doing it.

"He was just trying to be a good neighbour. Help out."

"Why did he think I needed....Oh, silly me. I forgot. Everybody knows you need a Y chromosome to change a tire," She rolled her eyes to the heavens. "Guys." 

At this point Sheila launched into one of her rants about the male sex, forgetting that this particular male was the husband of her listener. But Bernice wasn't in any mood to sit and listen to her husband being ridiculed. She stood up, gathered her cookie jar in the shape of a rabbit under her arm, and marched out without another word .

"Shoot. Me and my big mouth. I've done it again." Sheila muttered. She could have hit herself. "I'll be getting the cold shoulder for weeks."

She was right about that. The next morning at cards in the local community room Bernice came in, looked at Sheila sitting in her usual place, froze her with a look and went over to another table, although she usually sat with Sheila and her regulars. As it happened, the only empty chair was next to Mary Ryan. Choosing the lesser of two evils, she smiled at Mary as she sat down. Mary was surprised, and, it has to be said, pathetically grateful to be in Bernice’s good books so soon. Poor Sheila was left squirming. 

          Colette

If you were to describe Colette you'd probably say she was one of those people who are comfortable in their own skin. Maybe it's thanks to her parents who, when she failed a math test at school, told her "OK so you're no good at math. We still love you." They also took care to impress on her that being good at spelling didn't make her any more loveable than somebody who wasn't. Whatever the reason, Colette grew up to be a woman at ease with herself and with everybody else. So it was quite natural that when Sheila wanted to talk to somebody about the situation with Bernice she went to Colette.

“Well, I can tell you what a mature, emotionally healthy person would do,” Colette said after Sheila had told her the story. “But you won’t like it.”

“Oh. Go on tell me,” sighed Sheila. 

“Go to Bernice and apologise of course.”

“You’re right. I don’t like it. Am I at fault then? I mean, Bob was patronising me. Big man helping little woman.”

“You were struggling with a nut when he came over. Would you have managed to get it off by yourself?”

“I’m not sure. Oh, all right, I was a bit ungrateful. But Bernice giving me the evil eye and the silent treatment is just pure bullying. If I apologise to her, she’ll have won.”

“No way,” said Colette with a sly grin, “if two people are in the wrong, then the one that apologises first has the moral high ground. Bernice will be deflated. Especially if you tell her about that plantation guy in Africa. Lay it on thick”

“That’s wicked.”

“Too late for sainthood now.”

At which point, the two women broke into unseemly giggles, and Sheila went off to make amends with Bernice.

Colette had almost managed to restore order to the universe. But she had one more task to do. On the day of the flat tire, Sheila had called from the tire store and told her she wouldn’t be coming for coffee. Colette hadn’t gone to much trouble, but she had made one of her famous upside-down cakes. Not wanting to waste it she went to her neighbour Sandra, who had just moved in, and asked her over. That encounter gave Colette food for thought, and set a plan forming in her head.  Her mind made up, she invited Mary over for coffee. Yes, that Mary who had started all the trouble.

"I've just met our new neighbour, Sandra," she said casually, "real nice woman."

"Oh good," said Mary, "does she play cards?"

"No, but she does a bit of quilting. Sad story though."

"What's that?"

"About a year ago, her husband and son were killed in a car accident."

"Oh Colette! That poor woman. What can we do for her?"

"Just show her friendship I guess."

"She's a quilter you say. Do you think she'd like to go on that trip to Nova Scotia?"

"I'm sure she'd love it."

"Then you'll have to give her my ticket. Give her something to look forward to.”     

Mary was pleased to escape the trip - of course she was. But it wasn’t as big a deal as you might think. After the episode with Bernice she’d had a long talk with herself. She realised she didn’t actually like the person she’d been trying to turn herself into. So what would she gain by being more honest? Better to put up with sometimes being a phony - it was always with the best of intentions after all. And if she wanted to get out of things she didn’t want to do, she had to become less honest, not more. She needed to get better at coming up with a few white lies. At her age a few more ailments would be plausible. If she couldn’t think of something quickly enough, then doing something like looking at quilts for a week was a small price to pay. So she had resigned herself to the trip, but nevertheless was quite happy to get out of it. 

On the way home from Colette’s, Mary got to thinking just how well things had turned out. If she hadn’t accepted the trip, Colette would have given the ticket to somebody who really wanted to go, and Sandra might have missed out on a much needed treat. The thought made her feel even better. Once inside the house, Mary was in the mood for some music. She went through her collection, and picked out a CD by Crosby, Stills and Nash. It seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

                                 

A Cappella

  

You are a child of the universe 

no less than the trees and the stars;

you have a right to be here

And whether or not it is clear to you, 

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should

Desiderata

Max Ehrmann

I yam what I yam

                    Popeye

Mary

Why would a little old lady wake up on her 75th birthday and decide to make a new woman of herself? Well, in the case of Mary Ryan, it’s complicated. On the one hand, she’d spent her life being what the literature describes as a “people pleaser,” as if that’s a bad thing. But to Mary it wasn’t a bad thing. She was, and is, a genuinely nice person - all she ever wanted was for everyone around her to be happy. The thought of hurting anybody's feelings made her sick at heart. But you can't be nice all the time without being a phony at least some of the time. And that's her problem. Too often in her life she'd found herself doing things she didn't really want to do, appearing to have opinions she didn't really have, just to please other people. After a day of putting on an act, she would sometimes lie in bed and squirm. And the older she got, the more out of step with the world around her she became, so the more pretending she had to do. 

Things really came to a head about a week before her birthday. Mary lives in a small town in eastern Canada, in a Retirement Community called Sunrise Village. The developers  had originally called it Sunset Village until the insensitivity of that name was pointed out to them. The community consists of rows of bungalows in two crescents placed next to each other to form an "m" shape. Many of the residents liked to walk, bike, or in one case, run the crescents on a daily basis. Some of them would meet at the coffee shop at the end of the road. One morning, after her walk, Mary was sitting there with a neighbour, Sheila Jenkins, when Colette, another woman from the village, came in and spoke to Sheila.

"Fancy a trip to the quilt show over in the West End? I'm just on my way there, but my car won't start."

Sheila couldn’t go, because she had a dental appointment, so Mary volunteered to take Colette instead. She has little or no interest in quilts, but she volunteered readily enough. Not just out of niceness, but, living by herself since her husband died, she finds it hard to fill up all the hours in a day. Within half an hour, she and Colette were walking round at the show admiring quilts. Colette does some quilting herself, so her enthusiasm was understandable, but the finer details of the cutting and stitching were lost on Mary. It seemed like a lot of work. And after the first six or seven, what little interest she had was disappearing fast. Not that she gave any hint of that. Not wanting to spoil Colette's enjoyment of the show, she did her best to match her enthusiasm. Matched it too well, as it turns out.

The show was being sponsored by a bus tour company which was trying out a new trip to quilt shows in Nova Scotia. They had donated a door prize of two tickets, and when they did the draw, Colette had the winning ticket. She was delighted, and Mary was pleased for her, but then....

Colette saw Mary's shining face smiling up at her and couldn't help herself.

"Of course, you'll have to come with me. We'll have a ball."

Mary's heart sank. A week going round quilt shows was the last thing she wanted. She could have easily gotten out of it. All she had to do was say that the trip would be wasted on her, and Colette should take somebody who knew more about quilting. That's all she had to do. But that thought didn’t occur to her till afterwards.

"Oh, that would be lovely," she said.

Mary went home in a turmoil. Here she was, nearly 75 years old, and she had just agreed to spend a week pretending to be interested in quilts. It would be exhausting. In the days before her birthday, she did a lot of soul searching. She wasn’t happy with herself, and the root of the problem seemed to be she wasn’t honest about who she was. So, on the morning of her birthday, before she got out of bed, Mary determined she was going to change. She was finished hiding from the world; she was going to be honest with people; she was going to do the things that she wanted to do; she was going to get out of that trip to Nova Scotia.

It didn't take long for her resolve to be tested. On her walk round the crescents that morning she came across a neighbour Bernice deadheading her flowers. 

"Don't you just love Zinnias?" said Bernice, looking fondly at the mass of colour between her and Mary. It has to be said, this was probably a rhetorical question. Mary didn't really need to answer. She could have just made a comment about the weather. But no, she had resolved to be honest, and honest she would be.

"They aren't my favourite flower," she said. "Too prim and proper. They remind me of little old Victorian spinsters sitting around having afternoon tea, complaining about the untidy neighbours."

Bernice's face reddened. That was the first clue. She straightened up, stiffened, and looked coldly at Mary.

"Well I'm sure you don't have to look if they offend you so much." she said, and turned and stomped into the house.

Mary could only watch her in dismay. Heartsick, she carried on her walk, her stomach in a knot, her mind in chaos. This is what happens when you say what you think.  By the time she got to the bottom of the road, she'd given up all ambition to be a more honest person, and resigned herself to a week feigning enthusiasm about bloody quilts.

Bernice, Bob and Sheila

Bernice's reaction to Mary wasn't out of character. She's notoriously thin skinned, which Mary hadn't found out before because she'd always agreed with her. The merest perceived slight - a glance, a tone of voice, a wrong word, sets her off. She blames it on the time in high school when she was about to walk into a classroom and she heard someone say "Oh, I don't know, I quite like Bernice." The implications of that remark are hurtful it's true, but she was prickly before that. It just made her more vigilant that's all.

As soon as she came into the house after her encounter with Mary her husband Bob recognised the symptoms. She was in a snit and it would take her all afternoon to get out of it. At times like these, Bob found the best thing to do was get out of the way. He hurriedly closed his laptop and stood up. 

"I've got to go help Fred put new steps on his deck."

"Mary Ryan just told me my garden reminds her of a bunch of old spinsters."

"What?"

"She said the Zinnias look like a bunch of old ladies criticizing the neighbours."

"Sounds like she's the old lady criticizing her neighbours. Listen. I have to go, shouldn't be too long. With any luck Fred's nearly finished by now."

Bob threw on his work shoes and hustled out the door. He hadn't meant to go over to Fred's so soon. Fred prided himself on being a handyman, but the thing he was best at was getting other people to do things for him. Instead of cutting across the back, he decided to take the long way round. When he got to the end of the crescent he noticed Sheila Jenkins by her car changing a tire. She was struggling with one of the nuts. A perfect excuse for being late going to Fred's presented itself. He dashed over to the car.

"Here, let me do that," he said, nearly pushing Sheila out of the way.

Sheila is a woman with a strong streak of independence. In fact you could say she suffers from an excess of it. She considers asking anyone for help a sign of weakness. She had been changing her own tires for the last forty years, ever since the moment of her Great Humiliation. That happened when she was in Kenya, helping out at a dairy farm owned by the family of a friend from agricultural college. The family had gone off for a few days to a funeral, leaving Sheila in charge - but since the local men did all the work, being in charge didn't amount to much. But one of the men came back from delivering milk to a nearby coffee plantation with his face swollen and bruised. Turns out the plantation owner had punched him in the face when he dropped a crate of milk. Sheila was livid. She jumped in the truck and drove over to give the man a piece of her mind. The image of his fat red face laughing at her as she tried to tell him off has never left her. But worse was to come. Before she'd driven out of his driveway she got a flat tire. In her short life Sheila had never had any occasion to change a tire, so she had to go and ask the man for help. Standing there watching one of his workers change her tire, with that obnoxious boor next to her, not even bothering to disguise the self-satisfied smirk on his face, was the most humiliating experience Sheila was to ever go through in her life. 

Since that day on, she made it her business to know how to do everything she was likely to come across, from repairing machines to plumbing and wiring a house. Now here she was having to stand like a helpless female and watch Bob fumble around because he presumably thought he was better at it than her. On top of that, she would have to pretend to be grateful. She was so upset that when Bob eventually finished she jumped in her car and drove to the tire store, completely forgetting she was supposed to be having coffee with Colette that afternoon.

While Bob was "helping" Sheila, Bernice was at home stewing. First Mary Ryan insults her, then her husband can't take the time to listen to her and give her some sympathy. So she did the only thing she knew to make herself feel better - jumped in the car and went shopping. Of course at the bottom of the road she came across the sight of Bob changing Sheila's tire. Her husband, who didn't have the time for her, suddenly had time to help out a neighbour. She slowed the car down and gave them a look that was at the same time ice-cold with contempt and red-hot with fury. Fortunately, neither Bob nor Sheila noticed Bernice's car, so they didn't see the look she gave them.

At the store Bernice took a while to find something to put her in a better mood, but eventually she found a cookie jar in the shape of a rabbit with a hat on. She knew Bob would hate it, so she grabbed it, enjoying a laugh with the woman at the check-out, and then treated herself to a cup of coffee and muffin. She was just finishing her coffee and about ready to leave, when Sheila appeared at her table with a cup in her hand and asked if she could join her.

"I'm just waiting for a flat tire to be fixed," Sheila said. "Might take a while."

"Oh yes. I saw Bob helping you with your car."

"Right. Don't ask me why. He didn't seem to know much about changing tires, but he had to stop and do it for me."

Bernice bristled. It was one thing for her to criticise her husband, but she couldn't let anybody else get away with doing it.

"He was just trying to be a good neighbour. Help out."

"Why did he think I needed....Oh, silly me. I forgot. Everybody knows you need a Y chromosome to change a tire," She rolled her eyes to the heavens. "Guys." 

At this point Sheila launched into one of her rants about the male sex, forgetting that this particular male was the husband of her listener. But Bernice wasn't in any mood to sit and listen to her husband being ridiculed. She stood up, gathered her cookie jar in the shape of a rabbit under her arm, and marched out without another word .

"Shoot. Me and my big mouth. I've done it again." Sheila muttered. She could have hit herself. "I'll be getting the cold shoulder for weeks."

She was right about that. The next morning at cards in the local community room Bernice came in, looked at Sheila sitting in her usual place, froze her with a look and went over to another table, although she usually sat with Sheila and her regulars. As it happened, the only empty chair was next to Mary Ryan. Choosing the lesser of two evils, she smiled at Mary as she sat down. Mary was surprised, and, it has to be said, pathetically grateful to be in Bernice’s good books so soon. Poor Sheila was left squirming. 

          Colette

If you were to describe Colette you'd probably say she was one of those people who are comfortable in their own skin. Maybe it's thanks to her parents who, when she failed a math test at school, told her "OK so you're no good at math. We still love you." They also took care to impress on her that being good at spelling didn't make her any more loveable than somebody who wasn't. Whatever the reason, Colette grew up to be a woman at ease with herself and with everybody else. So it was quite natural that when Sheila wanted to talk to somebody about the situation with Bernice she went to Colette.

“Well, I can tell you what a mature, emotionally healthy person would do,” Colette said after Sheila had told her the story. “But you won’t like it.”

“Oh. Go on tell me,” sighed Sheila. 

“Go to Bernice and apologise of course.”

“You’re right. I don’t like it. Am I at fault then? I mean, Bob was patronising me. Big man helping little woman.”

“You were struggling with a nut when he came over. Would you have managed to get it off by yourself?”

“I’m not sure. Oh, all right, I was a bit ungrateful. But Bernice giving me the evil eye and the silent treatment is just pure bullying. If I apologise to her, she’ll have won.”

“No way,” said Colette with a sly grin, “if two people are in the wrong, then the one that apologises first has the moral high ground. Bernice will be deflated. Especially if you tell her about that plantation guy in Africa. Lay it on thick”

“That’s wicked.”

“Too late for sainthood now.”

At which point, the two women broke into unseemly giggles, and Sheila went off to make amends with Bernice.

Colette had almost managed to restore order to the universe. But she had one more task to do. On the day of the flat tire, Sheila had called from the tire store and told her she wouldn’t be coming for coffee. Colette hadn’t gone to much trouble, but she had made one of her famous upside-down cakes. Not wanting to waste it she went to her neighbour Sandra, who had just moved in, and asked her over. That encounter gave Colette food for thought, and set a plan forming in her head.  Her mind made up, she invited Mary over for coffee. Yes, that Mary who had started all the trouble.

"I've just met our new neighbour, Sandra," she said casually, "real nice woman."

"Oh good," said Mary, "does she play cards?"

"No, but she does a bit of quilting. Sad story though."

"What's that?"

"About a year ago, her husband and son were killed in a car accident."

"Oh Colette! That poor woman. What can we do for her?"

"Just show her friendship I guess."

"She's a quilter you say. Do you think she'd like to go on that trip to Nova Scotia?"

"I'm sure she'd love it."

"Then you'll have to give her my ticket. Give her something to look forward to.”     

Mary was pleased to escape the trip - of course she was. But it wasn’t as big a deal as you might think. After the episode with Bernice she’d had a long talk with herself. She realised she didn’t actually like the person she’d been trying to turn herself into. So what would she gain by being more honest? Better to put up with sometimes being a phony - it was always with the best of intentions after all. And if she wanted to get out of things she didn’t want to do, she had to become less honest, not more. She needed to get better at coming up with a few white lies. At her age a few more ailments would be plausible. If she couldn’t think of something quickly enough, then doing something like looking at quilts for a week was a small price to pay. So she had resigned herself to the trip, but nevertheless was quite happy to get out of it. 

On the way home from Colette’s, Mary got to thinking just how well things had turned out. If she hadn’t accepted the trip, Colette would have given the ticket to somebody who really wanted to go, and Sandra might have missed out on a much needed treat. The thought made her feel even better. Once inside the house, Mary was in the mood for some music. She went through her collection, and picked out a CD by Crosby, Stills and Nash. It seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

                                 

A Cappella

  

You are a child of the universe 

no less than the trees and the stars;

you have a right to be here

And whether or not it is clear to you, 

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should

Desiderata

Max Ehrmann

I yam what I yam

                    Popeye

Mary

Why would a little old lady wake up on her 75th birthday and decide to make a new woman of herself? Well, in the case of Mary Ryan, it’s complicated. On the one hand, she’d spent her life being what the literature describes as a “people pleaser,” as if that’s a bad thing. But to Mary it wasn’t a bad thing. She was, and is, a genuinely nice person - all she ever wanted was for everyone around her to be happy. The thought of hurting anybody's feelings made her sick at heart. But you can't be nice all the time without being a phony at least some of the time. And that's her problem. Too often in her life she'd found herself doing things she didn't really want to do, appearing to have opinions she didn't really have, just to please other people. After a day of putting on an act, she would sometimes lie in bed and squirm. And the older she got, the more out of step with the world around her she became, so the more pretending she had to do. 

Things really came to a head about a week before her birthday. Mary lives in a small town in eastern Canada, in a Retirement Community called Sunrise Village. The developers  had originally called it Sunset Village until the insensitivity of that name was pointed out to them. The community consists of rows of bungalows in two crescents placed next to each other to form an "m" shape. Many of the residents liked to walk, bike, or in one case, run the crescents on a daily basis. Some of them would meet at the coffee shop at the end of the road. One morning, after her walk, Mary was sitting there with a neighbour, Sheila Jenkins, when Colette, another woman from the village, came in and spoke to Sheila.

"Fancy a trip to the quilt show over in the West End? I'm just on my way there, but my car won't start."

Sheila couldn’t go, because she had a dental appointment, so Mary volunteered to take Colette instead. She has little or no interest in quilts, but she volunteered readily enough. Not just out of niceness, but, living by herself since her husband died, she finds it hard to fill up all the hours in a day. Within half an hour, she and Colette were walking round at the show admiring quilts. Colette does some quilting herself, so her enthusiasm was understandable, but the finer details of the cutting and stitching were lost on Mary. It seemed like a lot of work. And after the first six or seven, what little interest she had was disappearing fast. Not that she gave any hint of that. Not wanting to spoil Colette's enjoyment of the show, she did her best to match her enthusiasm. Matched it too well, as it turns out.

The show was being sponsored by a bus tour company which was trying out a new trip to quilt shows in Nova Scotia. They had donated a door prize of two tickets, and when they did the draw, Colette had the winning ticket. She was delighted, and Mary was pleased for her, but then....

Colette saw Mary's shining face smiling up at her and couldn't help herself.

"Of course, you'll have to come with me. We'll have a ball."

Mary's heart sank. A week going round quilt shows was the last thing she wanted. She could have easily gotten out of it. All she had to do was say that the trip would be wasted on her, and Colette should take somebody who knew more about quilting. That's all she had to do. But that thought didn’t occur to her till afterwards.

"Oh, that would be lovely," she said.

Mary went home in a turmoil. Here she was, nearly 75 years old, and she had just agreed to spend a week pretending to be interested in quilts. It would be exhausting. In the days before her birthday, she did a lot of soul searching. She wasn’t happy with herself, and the root of the problem seemed to be she wasn’t honest about who she was. So, on the morning of her birthday, before she got out of bed, Mary determined she was going to change. She was finished hiding from the world; she was going to be honest with people; she was going to do the things that she wanted to do; she was going to get out of that trip to Nova Scotia.

It didn't take long for her resolve to be tested. On her walk round the crescents that morning she came across a neighbour Bernice deadheading her flowers. 

"Don't you just love Zinnias?" said Bernice, looking fondly at the mass of colour between her and Mary. It has to be said, this was probably a rhetorical question. Mary didn't really need to answer. She could have just made a comment about the weather. But no, she had resolved to be honest, and honest she would be.

"They aren't my favourite flower," she said. "Too prim and proper. They remind me of little old Victorian spinsters sitting around having afternoon tea, complaining about the untidy neighbours."

Bernice's face reddened. That was the first clue. She straightened up, stiffened, and looked coldly at Mary.

"Well I'm sure you don't have to look if they offend you so much." she said, and turned and stomped into the house.

Mary could only watch her in dismay. Heartsick, she carried on her walk, her stomach in a knot, her mind in chaos. This is what happens when you say what you think.  By the time she got to the bottom of the road, she'd given up all ambition to be a more honest person, and resigned herself to a week feigning enthusiasm about bloody quilts.

Bernice, Bob and Sheila

Bernice's reaction to Mary wasn't out of character. She's notoriously thin skinned, which Mary hadn't found out before because she'd always agreed with her. The merest perceived slight - a glance, a tone of voice, a wrong word, sets her off. She blames it on the time in high school when she was about to walk into a classroom and she heard someone say "Oh, I don't know, I quite like Bernice." The implications of that remark are hurtful it's true, but she was prickly before that. It just made her more vigilant that's all.

As soon as she came into the house after her encounter with Mary her husband Bob recognised the symptoms. She was in a snit and it would take her all afternoon to get out of it. At times like these, Bob found the best thing to do was get out of the way. He hurriedly closed his laptop and stood up. 

"I've got to go help Fred put new steps on his deck."

"Mary Ryan just told me my garden reminds her of a bunch of old spinsters."

"What?"

"She said the Zinnias look like a bunch of old ladies criticizing the neighbours."

"Sounds like she's the old lady criticizing her neighbours. Listen. I have to go, shouldn't be too long. With any luck Fred's nearly finished by now."

Bob threw on his work shoes and hustled out the door. He hadn't meant to go over to Fred's so soon. Fred prided himself on being a handyman, but the thing he was best at was getting other people to do things for him. Instead of cutting across the back, he decided to take the long way round. When he got to the end of the crescent he noticed Sheila Jenkins by her car changing a tire. She was struggling with one of the nuts. A perfect excuse for being late going to Fred's presented itself. He dashed over to the car.

"Here, let me do that," he said, nearly pushing Sheila out of the way.

Sheila is a woman with a strong streak of independence. In fact you could say she suffers from an excess of it. She considers asking anyone for help a sign of weakness. She had been changing her own tires for the last forty years, ever since the moment of her Great Humiliation. That happened when she was in Kenya, helping out at a dairy farm owned by the family of a friend from agricultural college. The family had gone off for a few days to a funeral, leaving Sheila in charge - but since the local men did all the work, being in charge didn't amount to much. But one of the men came back from delivering milk to a nearby coffee plantation with his face swollen and bruised. Turns out the plantation owner had punched him in the face when he dropped a crate of milk. Sheila was livid. She jumped in the truck and drove over to give the man a piece of her mind. The image of his fat red face laughing at her as she tried to tell him off has never left her. But worse was to come. Before she'd driven out of his driveway she got a flat tire. In her short life Sheila had never had any occasion to change a tire, so she had to go and ask the man for help. Standing there watching one of his workers change her tire, with that obnoxious boor next to her, not even bothering to disguise the self-satisfied smirk on his face, was the most humiliating experience Sheila was to ever go through in her life. 

Since that day on, she made it her business to know how to do everything she was likely to come across, from repairing machines to plumbing and wiring a house. Now here she was having to stand like a helpless female and watch Bob fumble around because he presumably thought he was better at it than her. On top of that, she would have to pretend to be grateful. She was so upset that when Bob eventually finished she jumped in her car and drove to the tire store, completely forgetting she was supposed to be having coffee with Colette that afternoon.

While Bob was "helping" Sheila, Bernice was at home stewing. First Mary Ryan insults her, then her husband can't take the time to listen to her and give her some sympathy. So she did the only thing she knew to make herself feel better - jumped in the car and went shopping. Of course at the bottom of the road she came across the sight of Bob changing Sheila's tire. Her husband, who didn't have the time for her, suddenly had time to help out a neighbour. She slowed the car down and gave them a look that was at the same time ice-cold with contempt and red-hot with fury. Fortunately, neither Bob nor Sheila noticed Bernice's car, so they didn't see the look she gave them.

At the store Bernice took a while to find something to put her in a better mood, but eventually she found a cookie jar in the shape of a rabbit with a hat on. She knew Bob would hate it, so she grabbed it, enjoying a laugh with the woman at the check-out, and then treated herself to a cup of coffee and muffin. She was just finishing her coffee and about ready to leave, when Sheila appeared at her table with a cup in her hand and asked if she could join her.

"I'm just waiting for a flat tire to be fixed," Sheila said. "Might take a while."

"Oh yes. I saw Bob helping you with your car."

"Right. Don't ask me why. He didn't seem to know much about changing tires, but he had to stop and do it for me."

Bernice bristled. It was one thing for her to criticise her husband, but she couldn't let anybody else get away with doing it.

"He was just trying to be a good neighbour. Help out."

"Why did he think I needed....Oh, silly me. I forgot. Everybody knows you need a Y chromosome to change a tire," She rolled her eyes to the heavens. "Guys." 

At this point Sheila launched into one of her rants about the male sex, forgetting that this particular male was the husband of her listener. But Bernice wasn't in any mood to sit and listen to her husband being ridiculed. She stood up, gathered her cookie jar in the shape of a rabbit under her arm, and marched out without another word .

"Shoot. Me and my big mouth. I've done it again." Sheila muttered. She could have hit herself. "I'll be getting the cold shoulder for weeks."

She was right about that. The next morning at cards in the local community room Bernice came in, looked at Sheila sitting in her usual place, froze her with a look and went over to another table, although she usually sat with Sheila and her regulars. As it happened, the only empty chair was next to Mary Ryan. Choosing the lesser of two evils, she smiled at Mary as she sat down. Mary was surprised, and, it has to be said, pathetically grateful to be in Bernice’s good books so soon. Poor Sheila was left squirming. 

          Colette

If you were to describe Colette you'd probably say she was one of those people who are comfortable in their own skin. Maybe it's thanks to her parents who, when she failed a math test at school, told her "OK so you're no good at math. We still love you." They also took care to impress on her that being good at spelling didn't make her any more loveable than somebody who wasn't. Whatever the reason, Colette grew up to be a woman at ease with herself and with everybody else. So it was quite natural that when Sheila wanted to talk to somebody about the situation with Bernice she went to Colette.

“Well, I can tell you what a mature, emotionally healthy person would do,” Colette said after Sheila had told her the story. “But you won’t like it.”

“Oh. Go on tell me,” sighed Sheila. 

“Go to Bernice and apologise of course.”

“You’re right. I don’t like it. Am I at fault then? I mean, Bob was patronising me. Big man helping little woman.”

“You were struggling with a nut when he came over. Would you have managed to get it off by yourself?”

“I’m not sure. Oh, all right, I was a bit ungrateful. But Bernice giving me the evil eye and the silent treatment is just pure bullying. If I apologise to her, she’ll have won.”

“No way,” said Colette with a sly grin, “if two people are in the wrong, then the one that apologises first has the moral high ground. Bernice will be deflated. Especially if you tell her about that plantation guy in Africa. Lay it on thick”

“That’s wicked.”

“Too late for sainthood now.”

At which point, the two women broke into unseemly giggles, and Sheila went off to make amends with Bernice.

Colette had almost managed to restore order to the universe. But she had one more task to do. On the day of the flat tire, Sheila had called from the tire store and told her she wouldn’t be coming for coffee. Colette hadn’t gone to much trouble, but she had made one of her famous upside-down cakes. Not wanting to waste it she went to her neighbour Sandra, who had just moved in, and asked her over. That encounter gave Colette food for thought, and set a plan forming in her head.  Her mind made up, she invited Mary over for coffee. Yes, that Mary who had started all the trouble.

"I've just met our new neighbour, Sandra," she said casually, "real nice woman."

"Oh good," said Mary, "does she play cards?"

"No, but she does a bit of quilting. Sad story though."

"What's that?"

"About a year ago, her husband and son were killed in a car accident."

"Oh Colette! That poor woman. What can we do for her?"

"Just show her friendship I guess."

"She's a quilter you say. Do you think she'd like to go on that trip to Nova Scotia?"

"I'm sure she'd love it."

"Then you'll have to give her my ticket. Give her something to look forward to.”     

Mary was pleased to escape the trip - of course she was. But it wasn’t as big a deal as you might think. After the episode with Bernice she’d had a long talk with herself. She realised she didn’t actually like the person she’d been trying to turn herself into. So what would she gain by being more honest? Better to put up with sometimes being a phony - it was always with the best of intentions after all. And if she wanted to get out of things she didn’t want to do, she had to become less honest, not more. She needed to get better at coming up with a few white lies. At her age a few more ailments would be plausible. If she couldn’t think of something quickly enough, then doing something like looking at quilts for a week was a small price to pay. So she had resigned herself to the trip, but nevertheless was quite happy to get out of it. 

On the way home from Colette’s, Mary got to thinking just how well things had turned out. If she hadn’t accepted the trip, Colette would have given the ticket to somebody who really wanted to go, and Sandra might have missed out on a much needed treat. The thought made her feel even better. Once inside the house, Mary was in the mood for some music. She went through her collection, and picked out a CD by Crosby, Stills and Nash. It seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

                                 

A Cappella

  

You are a child of the universe 

no less than the trees and the stars;

you have a right to be here

And whether or not it is clear to you, 

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should

Desiderata

Max Ehrmann

I yam what I yam

                    Popeye

Mary

Why would a little old lady wake up on her 75th birthday and decide to make a new woman of herself? Well, in the case of Mary Ryan, it’s complicated. On the one hand, she’d spent her life being what the literature describes as a “people pleaser,” as if that’s a bad thing. But to Mary it wasn’t a bad thing. She was, and is, a genuinely nice person - all she ever wanted was for everyone around her to be happy. The thought of hurting anybody's feelings made her sick at heart. But you can't be nice all the time without being a phony at least some of the time. And that's her problem. Too often in her life she'd found herself doing things she didn't really want to do, appearing to have opinions she didn't really have, just to please other people. After a day of putting on an act, she would sometimes lie in bed and squirm. And the older she got, the more out of step with the world around her she became, so the more pretending she had to do. 

Author's Note

ignore grammar problems. At what point did you lose interest?