Content with a pile of magazines I was all set to wait for my car to be serviced. Procrastinating from preparing for a storytelling event I have been dutifully getting jobs done like paying bills, shopping and car servicing. Settled with some shabby chic decorating magazines and a few ultra chic decorating magazines I focused on the shabby and scoffed at the ultra ideas. Suddenly, the door opened and in skipped Maria, much to the delight of the service manager. he called out her name, joked with her and got her car into the service bay as well. She skipped over to where I was sitting, sat down with a fidget or two and looked all around the waiting room with interest. I searched for a suitable magazine for her and handed it over but right away she told me she didn’t read very much but her late no good husband did rather than talk to her. All he did was turn the pages of the newspaper over and over, flip. flip, flip so he didn’t have to talk at all. Well, that was good enough for me.
We spent the next hour or so having a wonderful visit. Maria, originally from Europe has had quite a life and she let me know all about it. She told me things in her own order of storytelling, jumping from one thing to another but with perfect clarity. Everything from how handsome her first husband was and how he died as a soldier to how much of a problem her drunk dad was and how she worked so hard to help her mother, also called Maria feed the other seven children in her family to her heartbreak of losing a daughter and how her other daughter is caring for her granddaughter crippled in a car accident to how she raised dogs and horses and taught riding and how she loved to go to play the slots with her girlfriends but now they have all passed away and how she moved to England from her homeland because of a no good man after her first husband had died and she had to work as a cleaner in a naval academy until she emigrated to Canada in the 1970’s to how she is studying to do her written driving test which should be no problem except for some of the convoluted sentence structure which she doesn’t quite grasp even though she knows how to express herself magnificently and that she was ninety two.
She showed me some gorgeous family pictures, filled me in and brought me up to date from pre world war 2 to now. I dropped one of the photos on the floor and before I could get it she had sprung to her feet, pulled out the chair it had fallen under and had it safely back in her collection. Gosh, she was cool and I wish she was my friend to see again and continue the visit. I think she felt the same.
An Embarrassment of Freedom 
What a great story. Maria sounds wonderful.