Crocuses, Olives, & Mongolia
Monday, March 5, 2007
Collette left home late that morning to pick up OLeif from work; from there, he dropped her off at the house before heading out to purchase computer supplies for work. Before Collette pulled out of the driveway, however, she noticed that the front yard was speckled with little clusters of purple crocuses. She wondered if they were merely growing wild, or if someone had purposely planted them there. It was warm enough for them to bloom. She noted a digital sign around town that morning which read 60 degrees.
Before Collette sat down to teach Rose, she got a call from OLeif who was at Best Buy.
“I need you to come over to Best Buy,” he said. “I locked the keys in the car and it’s still running.”
Collette didn’t ask how it happened. But forty minutes later she had driven out to Mid Rivers in the minivan, unlocked the door, walked around Best Buy trying to find OLeif, couldn’t find him, walked out to the parking lot, heard a whistle behind her, saw that it was OLeif who had gone inside looking for her, and had driven back to the house.
The rest of the afternoon was for teaching. Rose had just returned from Subway.
“I got in trouble last week,” she said. “The manager called me back to his office and said,” Rose began to imitate his Indian accent, “’You aren’t doing the count right. You put too many olives on the sandwiches.’ And I told him I was sorry, but that the customers always want more olives on their sandwiches. So he told me that I could only put on more than three olives if the customer asked me to.”
The Mom ran out for a hair trim and Rose switched conversation topics while Collette prepared to begin Rose’s next study subject.
“Augustus says he wants to marry Mz. Frizzle,” she laughed.
And, indeed, that is exactly what he had said the afternoon before, at dinner.
“He and OLeif squished me at youth last night, and stole my chair,” Rose went on.
Meanwhile, Snuggles had hopped up onto the coffee table and was chewing on the synthetic grass which was a part of the flower arrangement in the center.
“That’s right, Snuggles. Trim those plants,” Rose said to him, working on her textbook.
Also during the day, Dad’s birthday balloon was still afloat, 29 days after the fact. And Rose had unscrewed the glass shade from Mom’s lamp in the living room, which she had purchased years before from Cracker Barrel.
“It’s cracked,” Rose explained.
And it was.
Carrie returned from work after five, talking some about her intent to boycott the 2008 Olympic Games in China, due to the recent and continued murder of Tibetan priests and civilians by the Chinese government. Mongolia once again seemed to be under the scourge of China, as it had been so back in the late 1940’s. There was also discussion on work and about her manager’s brother who was a halo jumper, exiting planes four miles above the earth over in the Middle East.
“I bet that’s the kind of job you would like to have,” he had said to Carrie.
He apparently seemed a little worried that Carrie would find NAWS too boring, and quit. Carrie-Bri had to assure him that, for now, she was staying to earn some good income.
Carrie also began her first six of twelve marathon masters classes that day.
And Joe, who had been at work for most of the day, talked about more plans for Hawaii over dinner, then hurried off to the Hobcoggins for the evening, after cleaning up the dinner dishes.
OLeif came to pick up Collette after 8:30, once Dad, Mom, and Francis had returned from the Upward Bound family night. They brought boxes of drumsticks and ice cream sandwiches, which they ate over several of Rose’s Donald Duck episodes. And Collette and Linnea played one and a half rounds of Blokus.
Computers often kept OLeif overtime at work…
And baby continued to roll. It must have felt to him as though he were on the high seas those days.