World Market
Saturday, May 14, 2005
The day began in a gray way. Dad, Joe, and Francis were off on a Spring Camporee scouting weekend. Carrie was to spend the day with Elizabeth, re-highlighting her hair, tanning (the mist-on type), and perhaps evening have some CZ pierced… but hopefully she would forget about that. Collette and OLeif were to have breakfast at the bread company, spinach and egg soufflé.
Meanwhile, Rose was leaving with Samantha for the church work-day. And later, the girls would meet together with OLeif and take a trip over to the antique mall, and watch “A Pocketful of Miracles” for the Saturday night movie.
Collette had made plans to write a new piece. She had a good handful going already, but this piece was to be different – a mystery in the 1930’s, St. Louis. She was to write it the two weeks in June when she would not be tutoring. She hoped to wrap it up in eighty pages, making it more of a children’s book length. The star of this work would be a young Chinese girl named Li Mei, and the mystery would be in two parts, seen from her prospective, in imagination, and the other – the actual part. Collette wondered if she would actually finish it. What a wonderful thing it would be to complete another piece.
Friday afternoon, Collette had a whopper of a headache most of the work-day. Somehow, she finished it out, and OLeif met her at four-thirty with medicine. But her headache cleared as they drove out to Chesterfield in the anti-air-conditioned rust-mobile.
They stopped by World Market, just for the fun of it. Collette looked at the marzipan section once again. This time she checked the percentage of almond-flavoring in each piece. The vegetables, fruits, animals, and sea creatures, all seemed to contain 39% to 49%. The long chocolate covered marzipan log was 23%. Much better, she thought. She finally settled on a medium-sized log at 26%. They were still German marzipans, but so much better and less bitter. Meanwhile, OLeif was browsing the teas. He found an excellent little silver strainer scoop and a green tin of Irish breakfast tea.
“I’m going to start drinking tea every day,” he decided, showing her the wooden shelves of teas.
“Oh good,” Collette sighed with relief, “so much better than coffee.”
Then she found a bag of Parmesan pita chips, and they checked out.
Upon coming into World Market in the first place, Collette noticed a very thin woman wearing sunglasses, exiting. She seemed very tight-faced and small. Collette recognized her immediately. She was Mrs. Bayer, a lady from Kirk of the Hills all those years ago. She had a son, a year older than herself, who had played timpani under the instruction of Mr. Mather, their old orchestra director. It was eerie seeing someone from the old days again, although Mrs. Bayer would hardly recognize her now.