I took the marble stairs two at a time. Elspeth Waldron’s rump was smack dab in front of me when, out of breath and dabbing at my damp forehead with a used tissue from my coat pocket, I pushed through the glass doors of the Richard P. and Deanna D. DeNutti Community Room. As she backed up out of a worn leather sofa, the octogenarian librarian looked terribly wide. I made a mental note to myself: check out rear position in bathroom mirror at home
Bidwell-Coggin’s oldest living creature, aside from the California buckeye tree centering the quad, was, in her own words, “seventy-plus” so it was to be expected that she might appear stiff rather than svelte with her butt high in the air. Elspeth wore wisps of white hair in a cut that looked like it was trimmed with a buzz saw. Her blue eyes could charm a spider from its web and her lips curled over a fierce overbite to smile mischievously at the children. Dangerously huge chandelier earrings banged against the sides of her dewy cheeks. That she had so few wrinkles obviously intrigued the ladies who only-eat-organic because a gaggle of them in the pick-up line once commented that the skin care products in those days just did not include the arsenal of UVA blocks and free radical targets available today. It probably bugged the shit out of them that she wasn’t injecting toxins into her face. I even heard one of them suggest that Elspeth Waldron, Our Lady of Patchouli Oil, had had her face “done!” How absurd! Elspeth Waldron had the one thing they all wanted but would never achieve: self-knowledge. She was so serene and so bloody self-possessed I wanted to curl up in her lap and completely regress until she agreed to take me home like a stray.
“Clari, Baby. I thought you’d never get here,” Elspeth broke my reverie.
Bidwell-Coggin’s oldest living creature, aside from the California buckeye tree centering the quad, was, in her own words, “seventy-plus” so it was to be expected that she might appear stiff rather than svelte with her butt high in the air. Elspeth wore wisps of white hair in a cut that looked like it was trimmed with a buzz saw. Her blue eyes could charm a spider from its web and her lips curled over a fierce overbite to smile mischievously at the children. Dangerously huge chandelier earrings banged against the sides of her dewy cheeks. That she had so few wrinkles obviously intrigued the ladies who only-eat-organic because a gaggle of them in the pick-up line once commented that the skin care products in those days just did not include the arsenal of UVA blocks and free radical targets available today. It probably bugged the shit out of them that she wasn’t injecting toxins into her face. I even heard one of them suggest that Elspeth Waldron, Our Lady of Patchouli Oil, had had her face “done!” How absurd! Elspeth Waldron had the one thing they all wanted but would never achieve: self-knowledge. She was so serene and so bloody self-possessed I wanted to curl up in her lap and completely regress until she agreed to take me home like a stray.
“Clari, Baby. I thought you’d never get here,” Elspeth broke my reverie.
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