Columns from The Weekend West
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Cuts Both Ways
I glide around the shop display, high on the heady scent of perfumed candles.
“Would you like to sample our skin creams?” purrs the willowy shopgirl. She hands me a luxury Popsicle stick. With it, I scoop out a polite portion of Kashmir Petal lotion and knead my hands until I smell like a marshmallow. I admire her little amber pots arranged in careful rows along the counter and marvel at her equally decadent prices.
Into the shop walks a woman my age with a familiar face. I can’t place her but I know we’re acquainted somehow. Perhaps we have friends in common? I acknowledge her with a smile and say ‘Hi!’.
Old School Ties
She weaved through the crowd towards me. I grinned and waved. I hadn’t seen her since I was 17 and now I was 46. Yet here we were at our thirty year high school reunion and she’d hardly changed. She looked softer than I remembered. Her hair was shorter. It suited her.
She squeezed in beside me at the bar. As I puckered up to greet her, I saw her eyes dart down to my name badge and back up to meet mine. In that instant, I realised she had no idea who I was.
My school-mate tried to recover her composure. “Ros!” she said brightly, but my ego had already collapsed. Our conversation lurched into a catalogue of our offspring and then we floundered. I made a lame excuse about needing the bathroom and fled.
Reality Bites
“I’m trying to get the kids excited about the power of words,” her email said. “They are selecting subjects (for the rest of their lives).”
It was a letter from a high school English teacher, asking if I’d talk to her Year 10s. I cast my mind back to last century and tried to remember being 15.
That was the year I rolled down my camel-brown school socks until they sat like a pair of bagels around my ankles. I thought those bagel-socks made my legs look longer and shapelier. Really, I just looked like someone who needed to pull her socks up.
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