“She sat like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief.”
Shakespeare – Twelfth Night
We have removed ourselves for a season or so to the have-not province of Ontario, and although we have two daughters in this area, we have our own space, and I say this merely to inform you that we are not freeloading. I’m sure you care.
Of course, we took along with us our dog, Pixie, and part of my day to day routine is taking her for her walk, although, I suspect, she thinks she’s taking me for a walk. Generally speaking, I take the same route each day, ending at a rather level and grassy field behind an adjacent condominium. The one interruption on this grassy field is a monstrous boulder. I have often wondered how it got there because it just doesn’t seem that someone put it there for aesthetic purposes, nor does it even seem possible. I have concluded, because I once learned something like this in school, that it may have been deposited there by a glacier, a million or so years ago. Don’t ask me why it didn’t choose Newfoundland.
The other day when I came to this terminus, so to speak, I was totally amazed to find an elderly lady sitting right on top of the rock, with a faint smile on her face, and, … she was wearing green vamps. I told my wife about the green vamps later that morning and she said that it must have been ankle-socks. I know ‘vamps’ when I see them!
Now, since I had to pass this monstrous boulder with the lady sitting atop it, I had to stop and pass the time of the day with her. She didn’t say ‘hello’, ‘good-morning’ or any other similar greeting. Instead, she made eye contact with me and said, “I’m Napoleon’s Mom.”
Before I had a chance to laugh or say “Hi, Letizia’, that she was a long way from home, or ask some pertinent questions (e.g. - Did little Nappy take a nappy after you changed his nappy? I can be so hilarious at times!) she motioned her face in the direction of a small dog that was sniffing at some grass close to ‘The Rock’. The dog was obviously a dachshund, miniature if such there be, and I could see why she called him Napoleon.
She then wanted to know what pedigree Pixie was, and when I told her she was a cross between this and that, and also, that before we got her, she was heading to a shelter, she actually sniffed. She then indicated, haughtily, I suspected, that she could never do that. She then went on to say that she would definitely want to know what she would be getting before she bought a dog. I responded, jokingly of course, that Pixie might have had similar sentiments about us before she came to us. She didn’t seem to be amused.
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