I’m presently in Montréal and just had a very random conversation with a woman named Sue today. I’m not really sure who Sue is outside of the fact that she is the dear, old friend of my grandparents. She called to speak to my grandmother, who was not home, so she opted to speak to me instead.
There was no real getting to know you portion to our first phone conversation except for a brief: “Which one do you belong to?” To which I answered: “I’m their first grandchild, I belong to their first child.”
From there Sue and I talked about numerous things, all of which were quite interesting. Our conversation flowed freely and easily. We gabbed like old girlfriends, old friends three generations apart, who have no idea what the other looks like.
Sue talked about my maternal great-grandfather and his love for dancing the Mazurka, and the Tarantella. “I tell you, he’d dance like he was twenty years old.” She spoke of fond memories of spending the winter months in Fort Lauderdale with her husband and my grandparents. Her husband has since passed away, and she doesn’t travel much anymore. “It’s hard when you’re alone, you know?” Sue asked me where I live, I told her I moved to Vancouver nearly half a year ago. She has a son who lives here whom she visited regularly when her husband was alive. “I can do without the rain though, but when the sun is out … oh, it’s beautiful isn’t it?”
Sue used to smoke, “back when smoking was glamourous.” She mentioned how all the celebrities were pictured with cigarettes between their fingers and how they were associated with beauty and sophistication. Rita Hayworth, Greta Garbo … “They didn’t know back then how bad they were for you, so we all did it.” There was one moment in the early 1950s that made Sue quit smoking for good. She was sitting in a rocking-chair with her first-born daughter. Bottle in one hand, cigarette in the other. She looked down at her daughter under a nicotine haze, “… and I said, ‘What the hell am I doing?’” From that moment on she put one dollar in a jar each time she would have spent that much on packs of cigarettes. After twenty weeks, she had twenty dollars. “You know, I went out and did something nice for myself. I bought myself a dress for twenty dollars.”
“That’s great.”
“It was,” Sue laughed. “I called it my Cigarette Dress.”
Our conversation ended shortly after that. I think Sue may have felt as if she were boring me, but it was in fact the opposite. I like spontaneous conversations about random things, especially with the elderly. They have a different take on things, understand things a little better, they have that kind of “epoch” behind them, so I learn a little more.
I’ve been sitting here now, typing the first entry to my blog wondering what I can give up in order to buy my version of a Cigarette Dress.