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"I have some sad news," my father called me up to tell me this morning, "You know Thelma across the street? She passed away."
I may be pushing 40, but it's still hard for me to think of the woman across the street as "Thelma." She is, or was, Mrs. Wagner to me, and it's impossible for me to shift gears and think of her by anything else. She was the busybody of the street we lived on, and in good weather she was always in her front yard with a garden hose watering her lawn and her azalea bushes. Using a sprinkler would have denied her the opportunity to watch her neighbor's comings and goings, which was one of her greatest pleasure in life.
The younger of her two daughters, Dena, is a few years older than me, and I grew up wearing a lot of her hand-me-down clothes. I didn't mind this in the least, because they were mostly brand new and still had the tags on them. Mrs. Wagner would buy Dena clothes while Dena was at school, and it seems like Dena rejected at least half of what her mother brought home. After enough of these rejected clothes piled up in the closet, Mrs. Wagner would arrive on our front doorstep with a white plastic trash bag – and sometime a large black lawn trash bag – full of clothes, asking my mother to go through them and see if I could use any of them.
( Despite the Rumors, Beggars Can Be Choosers )
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.
"I have some sad news," my father called me up to tell me this morning, "You know Thelma across the street? She passed away."
I may be pushing 40, but it's still hard for me to think of the woman across the street as "Thelma." She is, or was, Mrs. Wagner to me, and it's impossible for me to shift gears and think of her by anything else. She was the busybody of the street we lived on, and in good weather she was always in her front yard with a garden hose watering her lawn and her azalea bushes. Using a sprinkler would have denied her the opportunity to watch her neighbor's comings and goings, which was one of her greatest pleasure in life.
The younger of her two daughters, Dena, is a few years older than me, and I grew up wearing a lot of her hand-me-down clothes. I didn't mind this in the least, because they were mostly brand new and still had the tags on them. Mrs. Wagner would buy Dena clothes while Dena was at school, and it seems like Dena rejected at least half of what her mother brought home. After enough of these rejected clothes piled up in the closet, Mrs. Wagner would arrive on our front doorstep with a white plastic trash bag – and sometime a large black lawn trash bag – full of clothes, asking my mother to go through them and see if I could use any of them.
( Despite the Rumors, Beggars Can Be Choosers )
