The Sound of Music, Alive!

I’ve finished reading my first book of the new year, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers – by Maria herself – and it is amazing how like “The Sound of Music” it is, which I always thought was a mere fictional, romantic account of a novitiate nun who marries the wealthy widower, Captain von Trapp, and leads his seven children into a singing career and out of their Austrian homeland at the height of Hitler’s reign. Why didn’t anyone tell me, I wondered – during all those teenage years when the movie was popular and I played the album over and over again on our Magnavox stereo at home – why didn’t any adult say to me, Oh, it was true . . . I remember when the von Trapp family singers toured this country during WWII . . . I remember hearing about them on the radio and seeing signs for concert tickets . . . in fact, there was a story about the von Trapp family in a November 1947 edition of Life Magazine . . . why? I didn’t know that, when the movie ends and the von Trapp family leaves Austria, they actually arrived penniless in America, slowly began a family singing career that would take them across America, and ultimately settled in Vermont to become dairy farmers.

I had to read about it in the newspaper only two weeks ago on the occasion of the death of the oldest von Trapp daughter, Agathe, who died suddenly from heart failure at age 97 in Hagerstown, MD after a long career as a kindergarten teacher. She is the eldest daughter portrayed as Liesl in The Sound of Music, and made famous by the song, “I am sixteen going on seventeen . . . “  I was 16 at the height of my album-playing craze, and that song was a favorite. My eyes really widened when I read that Agathe had only recently published a memoir, Memories Before and After the Sound of Music.

I love memoirs by ordinary people whose lives take an unexpected turn of fate – and then spend many years reflecting on it before telling us what they think.  Their own wonder has finally found the words . . .

My plan was to read Agathe’s book (and I will read it next), but my quick research discovered that Maria herself had published a memoir many decades ago, in 1949 – and the first 124 pages of that memoir became (about 15 years later) someone’s inspiration for "The Sound of Music," first a Broadway play and then a movie.  Maria von Trapp sold all the rights to her story for only $9,000 -- with no royalties.

Maria admits in the book she was always a mischievous young person. One day when she was visiting a small chapel with a friend of hers, she playfully pulled the rope to try out the sound of the bell in the steeple. Looking at her friend, she said, “I wish I could become a writer after I’m forty!” She meant it as a joke, but her friend didn’t smile, rather asked Maria if she knew the story of the bell. “Which story?” Maria said.

Her friend replied, “The people say that once in a hundred years it happens if someone rings this bell while pronouncing a wish, that wish, whatever, it may be, will come true, provided the person is unaware of the legend. The people of this valley call it the ‘wishing bell’.”

And surprisingly, Maria only just remembered that incident when she sat down to write the first few pages of her reflections as a middle aged woman living in Vermont . . .

This spirited novitiate Austrian nun (with a tendency for severe headaches while cloistered in the convent) never expected to one day marry a wealthy Captain 25 years her senior – nor to become a stepmother to seven, birth mother to three – nor to leave Austria penniless and to tour America as a singer – nor to become a dairy farmer in Vermont once the family stopped touring. She never meant to write a screenplay of what we now know as "The Sound of Music" – in fact, the book was meant to be a penned therapeutic reflection of her life with Captain Georg von Trapp who had died of lung cancer only a few years after arriving in America. She wrote the memoir instinctively out of both grief and joy – and often reflects on the inability to distinguish between the two. She had now become a dairy farmer, a part-time voice instructor, and a writer – in Vermont – which she says brought her life to full circle because it reminded her very much of her homeland – and of the wish she had once made to be a writer.

Agathe (whom I will always think of as Liesl, forever sixteen going on seventeen . . .) will be buried alongside her father, Captain Georg von Trapp; her stepmother, Maria, who died of heart failure in 1987; and five deceased siblings (another four remain quite alive, in America) at the Trapp Family Lodge (http://www.trappfamily.com/) which is now a ski resort operated by Trapp descendents in Vermont – though it was originally named Cor Unum by Maria, which in Latin means something akin to “being of one heart.”

The Two Lists

Back to my kitchen table for writing after one week in bed, or closely-so – or mostly-so. It was a necessary time after holiday frenzy to get sick and then to regroup, replan, refantasize, review and revise . . . not the way I usually do, or like to do – which is to compose my New Year’s list by careful thought and pen, and in upright position. It was a different kind of list-making this year, different kinds of resolutions – taking place in the heart this time, not so much in the brain, but in the heart . . .

I lay in bed with the flu virus circulating through the brain cells and spinal fluids, even into the bone marrow, keeping my body down and in a death grip – that’s how it felt – like two burly monsters, one on either side, holding me down -- in a death grip. There was something heavy on top of me too – Presence, I called it when trying to explain the feeling to my daughters this week – it was Presence that sat upon me and spoke while the burly guys did the heavy handed work of holding me there – held me till I said . . . what? . . . I said nothing; they did all the talking this time, and not by words. Presence sat upon me till by some osmosis of weight and stealth and time, she made me listen – not with ears and mind, but with heart. The heart gives way, relaxes under such weight; it melts under degrees of heat; it capitulates by force of silence.

I recall a thing that came to me late one night as a bit of consciousness bubbled to the surface: the concept of Two Lists. In my delirium, I thought of lists – the categorization of things, plans, and circumstances, and of how I loved (in my previously healthy lifestyle) to organize my life and daily plans by such visual prompts. But in this case, as illness seared my body, I saw in my mind two lists -- one was titled Serenity, and the other Courage . . .

. . . and I thought of how many things I edged against in my life – and for how many years – things that were not meant to be etched there under Courage for they took only cheap stubbornness and anger to be there – and so I saw them extricated to that other side, Serenity. This is a place I’d have to start visiting in 2011 in order to make peace there; I‘ll have to sit beneath those things as I did beneath those two burly flu virus guys – I’ll have to make my peace with them, relax under their weight, just see by experience if I can still breathe once the peace is made – or not.

And so I started the mental work of moving things over to Serenity – actually, saw them being moved over – all those things that it hadn’t worked to rail against, no matter how long I tried . . .

This all took place in the dark aspects of night – 2:20, 3:36, 4:03 – these are a.m. hours – and each time I was raised into conscious thought I saw the lists had been redrawn or recharted for me. It was a thing going on betwixt the two burly guys as they fought it out over me, wrestled for the heart that still pumped itself feebly in between.  She, Presence, remained calm and on top of me.

I remember one time waking into conscious thought, a profuse sweat and rapid heartbeat enveloping me, and seeing how long and profound that first list had become – Serenity – and how squat and short was the Courage one.

I came out with three gems for the New Year – and those three things I remember – because when I woke to get out of bed sometime in the next day or two, I saw a notecard on which some words had been jotted down in delirious handwriting, a word or two to represent each thought – and I’m glad I found the notecard or I wouldn’t have remembered this experience (a reason to love lists) – they were a surprise to see at all – old friends, a tangible reminder of the two burly guys and Presence who paid me a visit on the cusp of 2011, left a few words – then freed me to go.

The Chatty Pile

I purchased a screech owl image for my Christmas card this year; it is perched on a pine tree branch, set against a backdrop of stars in a dusky blue sky. It seems to be cocking its head with something to say. I take one out of the box this morning, and doubt myself – have I become one of those people who send out an ugly Christmas card? Why did she consciously choose this card from all others on a display rack? That’s what others might think when they open it – one forlorn owl on a bent pine tree branch?

The Christmas card, I think, has gone the way of stationery, the abacus, the dial phone, and good handwriting. I’ve received a few cards so far this year; I might receive a few more – they are hurriedly signed, not annotated with news or good wishes; in one case the card was not signed but rather pre-printed with the names of all four family members.  I received one jaunty email “card” replete with dancing snowman in a Santa Clause suit.

I remember the rainy afternoon when I bought the screech owl card. I felt cheap that day and didn’t want to spend anything at all on a card that no one, I guessed, would bother to look at twice. That’s what I thought as I stood in front of the display of bird-themed cards in my favorite bird-supply store. One box had been mis-priced – or else it was a carryover from last year’s stock – for it was three dollars less than the boxes of cardinal-, woodpecker-, and geese-graced cards. That’s why I chose it – the owl cards cost three dollars less.

I always used to ponder long and hard about the handwritten message I would write on each greeting card, even if only to rephrase the pre-printed message inside. But lately I’ve begun to feel like “one hand a-clapping” – still trying to be personal and chatty in this age when so much more can be updated through email, facebook, twitter, text message, or whatever else. Yes, my owl of the silent night would like to say something new and personal – but she’s been rendered silent by all the up-to-the-minute clamor of the daylight hours.

I remember when my mother would set up the card table in the living room for a week in December in order to methodically work each evening on the Xmas card list – many pages of addresses, saved and refined over many years, written in double columns, front and back, a list folded and refolded to the tearing point – the names and addresses of all those many friends, old neighbors, distant relatives, church members, square dance partners, army buddies, high school friends, etc. Occasionally there would be a name crossed off – and that had meaning too. Also on that card table were several boxes of greeting cards . . . a red pen . . . sheets of postage stamps bearing the Madonna-and-Child image. These stamps were not self-adhesive, but had to be licked. That was my job, as a child, to lick and place the stamp just-so in the upper right hand corner of the envelope – and also to lick the envelope flaps closed.

At that time an envelope could travel for a penny less if its flap were tucked in rather than sealed to its body – and it could only be tucked in legally if no written words other than a signature had been invested inside. And so there were two piles of envelopes on the card table back then, those whose flaps were tucked in because they contained no personal message, and those whose flaps were to be licked shut because they contained a handwritten greeting – a chatty, personal, loving, long, and wishful annual message written in red ink on a separate sheet of tablet paper that was folded and placed inside the card – and that cost one extra penny to mail.

The two stacks towered higher each day on the card table as the annual job of keeping in touch progressed – the chatty pile, I remember, outpacing the other by twice or thrice until it fell over and had to be made into more piles.

Blackwing

The new Palomino Blackwing pencils which became available in October of this year are amazing – a rendition of the defunct original Blackwing 602 by Eberhardt-Faber which was made famous by John Steinbeck when he wrote East of Eden in the early 1950s. Whoever devised these pencils – copycat or new, they are the thing, and I know Steinbeck would approve.

Steinbeck spent two months in preparation and research for the writing of East of Eden – and a good bit of that research went into the pencil he would use. He declared the Blackwing 602 to be "the perfect pencil." He was said to sharpen 60 Blackwing pencils each morning so he didn’t have to stop writing in order to sharpen one over the ambitious six-hour workday. And he had an eccentric rule about how long they would last: “When the metal of the pencil eraser touches my hand, I retire that pencil.” He called the electric pencil sharpener a needless expense, but one he was willing to indulge because it saved his hands for writing.

The slogan on the original pencil is, “Half the Pressure, Twice the Speed.”  I miss seeing that slogan on the new Palomino pencil, though it otherwise feels and acts the same as the original which went out of production in 1998. Steinbeck has much to say about the Blackwing in his book, Journal of a Novel, which is a sort of diary of his daily life and thoughts behind the writing of the Eden book. He talks freely about the daily interruptions from friendly callers, carpet cleaners, carpenters, an ex-wife, etc. And he has a lot to say about Blackwings – the speed, the glide, the precision, the hexagonal barrel, the extra length, the no-break points – all praiseworthy and practical reasons to use them. But as I sit to write with my few remaining Blackwing 602s – and now a full box of the new Palomino Blackwings from http://www.pencils.com/ – I wonder if Steinbeck ever brought the pencil to his upper lip, as I do, between paragraphs, to inhale the fragrant California cedar . . .

. . . transporting me to river banks where freshly caught salmon is smoked over embers of cedar and ash – bronzed skin toting planks for the smouldering pile – the rush of freshly fallen water, cascading white over rocks worn smooth by centuries of never ending sound – echoes of the source of all sound – a rhythm of dance, the beat of drums, the hum of cicadas at night . . . that is where my Blackwings take me . . . to that place where sound begins. Was Steinbeck ever there? Is he there now?

But I am brought back too quickly . . . the phone rings . . . the Bradford pear trees need trimming and here is the estimate and the prognosis . . . my phone caller sparks numbers at me, the time he will arrive, the cost . . . the heat pump clicks on, that noisome smell of burnt dust on electric coil . . . I should call to get those cleaned . . . I boil filtered water for tea, thinking about all these things . . . inhaling cedar once again, longing to take flight to that place where writing can begin . . .

Angel's Share

I always like to punctuate my annual trip to Gethsemani monastery with a tour of a bourbon distillery. There are seven major distillers of Kentucky bourbon, America’s only native spirit, all within a 30-mile radius of the monastery and the Kentucky River’s limestone water source – and I have now visited five of those houses of alchemy. I never tire of the story of fermentation and the 235-year-old struggle to perfect and lifeguard a purely local art that is now cherished around the world.

Real bourbon can be made only in Kentucky – the secrets being local limestone-rich water and charred white oak barrels. The whole story of bourbon came about by accident:  Daniel Boone-style moonshiners in the 1700’s who eventually got good enough at their trade to ship corn whiskey to New Orleans via the Kentucky River – but one batch went bad because of the barrels’ previous contents (probably fish or vinegar which had been shipped in the barrels before being filled with whiskey). In the interest of economy, distillers began to torch the inside of their shipping barrels before filling in order to kill whatever prior flavors (ergo, bacteria) had been left there. This torching, unbeknownst to them, brought out the oak’s natural sugars which would in turn impart a toasty/oaky flavor as well as a deep amber-red color to the whiskey. The immediate message from New Orleans was, “Send us more of that charred whiskey!” The charred whiskey was eventually called Bourbon because of the town’s name near the shipping dock on the Kentucky River where the barrels were loaded for transport. As every tour guide will say, “All bourbon is whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon.”

A visit to a bourbon distillery is a revival of the senses. Before one even emerges from the car, the heady smell of fermented grain and torched oak infuses the nostrils and lungs. In past years, I have attended Maker’s Mark, Buffalo Trace, and Woodford Reserve; this year I attended two distilleries – Jim Beam and Heaven Hill, the two oldest and largest of the lot. I have two more to go, maybe next year – Turkey Hill and Four Roses.

Tours usually begin near the silos where mostly corn, but also rye, barley, and sometimes wheat are ground and made into a mash, then placed in room-sized fermentation vats made of copper or wood; they are infused with special yeasts and left to ferment and bubble for months at a time before distillation; torched barrels are filled and taken to a warehouse where they will stay in a climate controlled environment for four to 20 years – or more. "Tasters" are a special breed, born and bred in Kentucky as far as I’ve heard – and nothing is bottled before their discriminating approval.

Much like bread baking or any home fermentation process, the life of the bourbon is in the yeasts that convert plant starch into sugar and alcohol. Each distillery touts its own strain of living yeasts that flavor its product just so. There was tragedy just 14 years ago when the Heaven Hill Distillery burned to the ground. Our tour guide, a young man barely over drinking age, said he lived about 20 miles from the distillery at the time; walking home from school that afternoon, he could see billows of smoke and smell the burnt oak and yeasty bourbon. The distillery was producing bourbon only a few years later – and only because the precious yeasts had been saved.

He talked about Jim Beam, a fourth generation distiller (there are now seven, and an eighth is trying to decide what to do with his life) who saw the family distillery through the hell of Prohibition – that’s how they refer to it in Kentucky – and Mr. Beam was back mixing corn with limestone water at the cost of $1,190.48 only two or three days after Prohibition ended – because he had kept the vitality of the bourbon yeasts in a jar at home. Our tour guide said Mr. Beam was known for a lifetime of carrying his jar of living yeasts to work each morning – in case the house burned down – and carrying his jar of living yeasts home each night – in case the distillery burned down.

 A small screen with the pattern of many four-leaf clovers without the stems was placed at the opening of one oak barrel on our tour, allowing precious 10-year-old vapors to waft through the screen. “Now where have you seen a screen like this?” our tour guide asked. One small pious woman with a tall red-faced husband nearby piped up, “In a confessional!” Her husband seemed surprised to hear such a large voice emit from his tiny wife.

Each of us filed solemnly past the “confessional screen,” taking in celestial vapors to the deepest recesses our lungs would allow. Eyes began to roll, heads to swoon – and we many strangers from foreign lands began to speak in one tongue, each to each.

“Angel's share,” our tour guide explained, referring to the 30 percent volume which is lost to evaporation from each barrel. "We give 60 percent of our profits to the tax man . . . 30 percent in vapors to the angels . . . and what’s left, we drink . . . “

The tasting room is where the real fun begins. Strangers become friends seemingly for life, except that we forget to exchange addresses once the tour is complete. I have photos of people from Australia, London, Scotland, Mississippi, California . . . a section of Atlanta where I used to live, and even from around the corner in Louisville, Kentucky. You see, we are given generous portions of pricey stock – 10-year single barrel, 18-year single barrel, 9-year small batch, 12-year 'very special' batch, an unfiltered, uncut variety that is 125 proof . . . A process of the senses begins – comparing color though sunlit windows; sniffing with the lips slightly parted to give angel vapors an entranceway through the olfactory gates; finally, tasting and comparison before question and group discussion time. Very happy now, we are each given a chocolate bourbon ball and led into the glimmering gift shop . . .

I drove carefully back to the monastery in time for Vespers that evening – thinking about the Life that is 'caretaked' so lovingly in all manner of ways on this earth – and I do believe the monks’ voices were never more angelic.

Removing Shoes

Gethsemani – This Trappist monastery in tiny Bardstown, Kentucky was made world-known because of the writer/monk Thomas Merton who wrote many forward-thinking spiritual books while cloistered here in the 1950’s and 60’s. My first visit here three years ago came about from a writer’s curiosity to see the place where a favorite writer had worked and lived, and was now buried – not to mention the promise of silence and 2,000 acres of walking trails for the contemplation of my own fledgling writer. “Retreatants,” as we weeklong guests are called, take a vow of silence for the week – that’s all. About half the retreatants are Catholic, the rest are something else or nothing at all or undecided.

This place draws me. I’m drawn to it. Just when I was thinking this will be my last year here – after all, it’s too far to travel, there are other ways to find a week of silence, etc. – I realize I must come here every year just at this time, the third week in October. Trees-full of birds greeted me when I got out of the car. Come every year, they said. Others must think the same, for there are so many familiar faces from last year – about 10 of the 30 retreatants I recognize from last year, this same week. I see license plates from all over the country, people who have driven more than my mere 600 miles.

There’s a reason I was drawn to read all of Thomas Merton’s books as a teenager, using babysitting money for each new purchase. But why? I’ve been told (by monks) that was very unusual, but my life has become very usual, nothing spectacular, nothing extraordinary. I always wanted to write as a child – then went to college, worked, got married, stayed home with children, and now wonder what to do with the rest of my life. Writing, in the bit of time I steal from the daily routine, holds little promise of the extraordinary . . .

Father Damien is our talking Guestmaster here at the monastery. He just got back from a three-month visit to Indonesia, the place where Merton ultimately died from a tragic accident in 1968. Fr. Damien is 77 years old, and he says he is not the same person he was five years ago – or five years before that. He struggled throughout his middle age to find what he was “meant to do” – though he knew since fourth grade that he wanted to be a priest and was at the time a successful pastor. “The clock was ticking in me every day,” he said, and it was in his mind that the clock was ticking: “What was I meant to do?” Strangely, he said, the clock stopped ticking when he drove up the Gethsemani driveway for a week of reflection about 20 years ago.

“So this is it – to make cheese the rest of my life?” Everyone laughed when he said that because even the monks, most of all the monks, make light of the daily, ordinary tasks of making cheese and fruitcakes to feed the masses. (Actually, they also say it’s the most radical, alternative lifestyle imaginable.) But it was true, he said, that he felt he had “arrived” – and it wasn’t glamorous as he thought his life’s work would be. He chose the name Damien as a young priest because he wanted to do great works, be a great missionary, be famous and renowned as the leper Saint from whom he chose his name. He said this with no face or voice of that former self – just a fact, as though saying he used to eat peanut butter sandwiches as a youth. He finally has the sense of being who he really is, he said – still a priest, but now a monk, and in a place where he grows and learns so much every day that he is “not the same person” he was five years ago. His days, he said, are like a kaleidoscope that is moved ever so slightly each day, so that the entire image is changed and a new perspective is always emerging from such small shifts – and it’s not over yet, he said.

While in Indonesia, he said he went into the mosques five times a day to pray as the Muslims pray – which must have seemed like a vacation because the Trappist monks pray/chant seven times a day beginning at 3:00 a.m. He entered the mosques wearing his cleric collar, and was asked only to remove his shoes as is the tradition. That kind of broadmindedness and inclusiveness – from both sides – is most likely why I was drawn to read Merton as a young adult. He talked about the profound respect implied in the small act of removing one’s shoes, and related something from the Bible about when Moses was at the burning bush and God told him to remove his shoes – “You’re on Holy ground now.”

I think of my decades-long Buddhist practice, and of how the shoes are always removed and left at the door of a meeting place; I think of my habitual tendency to remove my shoes when coming into my own house; of gladly discarding shoes the minute I see a beach before me; and of my curious preference for writing without shoes. Even when my feet are cold on the kitchen floor, I always write without shoes. Maybe that means something.

It’s an ordinary life for Fr. Damien, but one that he was meant to live – and he knows that – and that’s the kind of thing I take my shoes off to.

Selling Candy

Many women turn to sales as a means of making money and gaining some independence once the children are grown. This takes many forms – real estate, makeup, nutritional products, retail sales, and policies of all varieties . . .

I ate my breakfast at a Cracker Barrel in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, and saw from a few tables over a woman in her mid-sixties who had taken on such a role – she spoke to a like-aged couple across the table over a hearty breakfast of ham, sausage, coffee, eggs, grits and sawmill gravy. Great stacks of papers and brochures were spread out before her as she approached this couple with her goods – “The cost will be right at 6,000 dollars for the two of you,” was the first thing I heard her say, and it was the way she said do-oll-ars, with more syllables that it really has, that caught my attention and made me think about the importance of selling once a woman gets older and it’s too late to go back to school. I thought she might be peddling a trip overseas, because of the brochures, and I listened up to hear what exciting place they were going for such a grand fee. But I could never hear more than an essential word or key phrase during our breakfast because of the commotion of coffee cups and busboys and children eating pancakes, demanding more syrup and such.

The saleswoman wore a zebra patterned topper/knit jacket sort of thing, striped yardage that generously covered her solid black pants and a black top beneath. There were many chains of gold around her thick neck and her hair was coiffed up big atop her large head, frosted blonde and streaked with other stripes of varying shades. She had large gold hoop earrings and a big powdery jowl that jiggled when she proposed her point or changed pages for the couple to see differing views. She wore those half moon kind of glasses that fell down low on her nose so she never had to actually look the couple directly in the eyes but rather dodged them repeatedly from either below or above her glasses. Her arms were spread out wide on the table because of all the girth between, and her fingers were fat and waxy looking, strangled by big star-shaped rings that flaunted colored jewels and maybe diamonds. The finger nails were thick like horses’ hooves, painted bright pink and trimmed to a squarish angle. I thought of the limestone imbued Kentucky water that is attributed for strong bones in both horses and people in the Kentucky region – limestone, the same reason, by the way, that grass is blue and real bourbon can be brewed only in Kentucky. Those thick jousting fingernails pointed to clauses in the papers, lines that were to be signed, and they made a scratchy noise on the paper . . .

“But if you buy in the summer . . . “ I heard her say when the couple flinched and tightened their lips on hearing the first figure of 6,000 dollars. I began to wonder, what destination might cost less in the summer months? But I could think of nothing reasonable.

I heard the word Medicare come up in between children yelling, and later the word deductible, so I began to doubt the couple’s travel plans and instead thought they were planning for some kind of nursing care – or an insurance policy – or maybe cemetery plots? But why were the summer months cheaper?

The saleswoman was patient and “on their side,” because at one point she said, “Oh no, you shouldn’t have to pay for that . . . my package includes . . . ” and she shook her jowl definitively. She had the art of being serious and trusty about certain points, but she could punctuate her seriousness with friendly laughter when appropriate. The wife leaned over to confide something to the saleswoman, and the saleswoman leaned closer too, and the husband backed his chair away to gain the attention of a waitress with a coffee pot. The two women were becoming friends it appeared.

“Well, tell me then, how much are you willing to pay? I can write this up any way you like,“ the saleswoman said in a voice that grew suddenly loud and businesslike.

Someone in the kitchen dropped a full tray of dirty coffee cups and our entire non-smoking section voiced, “Ohhh . . . “ -- and so I never heard the couple’s reply.

The man rocked back on his chair and entwined his fingers behind his head, letting his elbows branch out to either side of his head – like a man who has been arrested and told not to move. But in this case, he rocked back and forth in the chair, removing himself from the interaction but at the same time giving in to it.

After rocking a few minutes, he excused himself to go pay the check for the table of three. I had already lingered long enough to imbibe a third cup of coffee when really one is plenty for me, so I figured it was my time to go as well. I made a point of walking past the table of business, just to see what the woman was selling – but spread across the papers was an open checkbook which the wife had pulled out of her purse. I saw those fat waxy fingers, pink lacquered nails, and glittering rings – they thrust forth a pen. Perfume wafted over the smell of sausage and bacon. I wanted to chase after the husband, “No, go back, don’t let her do it!”

It wasn’t intentional, but I found myself standing behind the man as he paid the check. I wanted him to hurry so he could get back before his wife finished writing the check. But the woman behind the counter wouldn’t leave well enough alone. “Would you like some candy bars, sir, we’re having a two-for-two sale today,” she said. (If you buy two you get two for free? I think that’s what it means.) He shook his head demurely as he folded his wallet to hide it away from one last intrusion – and this is where someone might suspect, but not really know as I knew, that something was on the man’s mind – he said, “I don’t know how you women do it. I couldn’t sell a thing if my life depended on it.”

She said kindly, “Sir, I’m not selling candy, I’m just offering it to you.”