Tim Webster

She got me again tonight. I was walking Elwood, my dog, when to my chagrin I spotted her leaning against her letterbox.

There’s an elderly lady that lives two streets down on the corner. When I would walk my dogs, William and Elwood (William has since passed), her fixed mind triggered by Willy’s golden curls, she was compelled to discuss Simon and his similarity with her deceased husband. Though she is still unaware they are now more in common than her mind has established. Simon is dead. Her husband was an engineer with yearnings to practice medicine, whereas Simon had studied medicine for several years and then began an engineering degree.

Anyone that knows me knows that I have a kinship with most elderly people. This simply stems from my seeing the elderly as ageing vessels with more ocean hours than newer models clocked up. Their tales of the high seas are many and varied, often springing from the most rusted moored dingy.

But this lady is a vulture. Like a stunningly beautiful male or female, this little old lady fits the cute, slightly befuddle old-duck stereotype with calculating accuracy. She stands on the street corner most days, apart from the very cold, and like a pedophile loitering around primary schools, she poises for the sting of suburbanites walking their own streets. A child pedaling home, a young family walking their dog, or myself, caught unawares, not by the content of her never-changing stories but the act of beginning them.

(Was posted a while ago. Accidently deleted it while stuffing around, so posted again.)