Celebratin’

—“Yer gonna stand there and talk to me without wanting to go back to work?”
I said that to pretty *****, my pharmacist, after she gave me a flu shot.
“Sure!” she said. This contradicts my upbringing: “no pretty girl will smile at you!”
“Marked-for-life,” I always say. I expect pretty ladies to wanna avoid my company.
“If there’s one thing I learned since my wife died,” I told *****; “it’s to strike up a conversation, especially with women. It may bomb, but if so, it’s their loss.”
“I wouldn’t be a pharmacist except I like meeting people,” she said. And ***** is not an easy smiler, but she was smiling. Even behind her mask. I could tell.
And I had just hit her with a long explanation of train-chasing. I give her my train-calendar, and she tells me her son (age-5) loves it.
That explanation probably sailed right over her head, but she smiled anyway. I was talking to her; I think that’s what women want most.
Especially with a guy who listens, and not some on-the-make geezer.
Let ‘em talk; they’re likely to say something I wanna hear.
A simple exchange of emotions: e.g. “I don’t know how someone as tiny as you can have children?”
Or “my son loves that calendar; ‘mom, look at this!’”
“So why at age-76 do I continue to do these train-chases in Altoony? It’s your son’s bashful reaction, and you too.
We’re making him happy, although I like it too. Been doin’ it since age-2.”
Finally I got up to leave. “Back to work!” she said, sighing. And it was me ending things, as always. Pretty ***** had kept listening to me, and wouldn’t leave.
Sorry readers. After 70+ years of avoiding people, and believing no pretty girl would talk to me, I celebrate too much.