I know that I'm not the only person in the world who's prone to snap judgments and easy stereotyping. I say this in apology, because yesterday I was guilty of a spectacular misjudgement, a wildly incorrect speculation. It's time to kneel on ground glass, to scourge myself (metaphorically speaking).
One of the attendees of a support group that I attend is a "little old lady." Elderly, gray in complexion and attire. Wizened, juiceless. She looks as though nothing of any moment happened to her in all her eighty or eighty-five years.
Her husband, Steve, died last week. Here's the piece of her story that she revealed.
"I was Steve's third and fifth wife. He was an airline pilot, so we traveled together all over the world. Steve had two children by his first wife; I had five children by my first husband. I had so many babies because they started to come in pairs. At his funeral I played some of the Bach preludes."
You, gentle imaginative readers, can fill in the blanks. There are many, several novelsworth, in fact, starting with the obvious question, "who was wife number four; tell me about her?"
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