scheme or design of any kind; it was very eclectic. She had old books stacked on every shelf and piled in every corner. Pieces of yellowed paper with wise quotes hung on her refrigerator by magnets. Pictures and paintings in old frames covered all her walls. I could have spent weeks there asking her about all the pictures and the quotes, but if I had done that I really would have missed the bus again! I just asked her about one picture. It hung to the left of the window that looked out onto the street and right above her dining table, which seated two. It was an old black-and-white photo of a man in a suit and tie with perfectly trimmed hair. He had very kind eyes. “Is that your husband?” I asked.
“It was.”
And then she told me all about Bubbles. About how he wouldn’t serve in the army even though I guess he was supposed to. How he said he would only put on a uniform that made him truly be of service to humanity, which is why he worked in restoration. Justine said she was so proud of what Bubbles did for a living. He spent a lot of time restoring the tile work in the old buildings in Canterbury. It was very tedious, specific work meant only for artists who had a sense of history and who cared about future generations in a very real sense. “Little things, little things, are much more important than big things. Big things hit you in the face with their bigness and obscure the little, more important things that really define a life and provide it with delicacy.” I’ve quoted her here because I remember, verbatim what she said because it sounded so real and so true. I wished I understood it the same way her face showed that she did.
I must have looked a little confused so she said politicians and movie stars and bank accounts were big things that got in the way of living. And when I said to her that, well, you need a bank account to survive, she said I was dead wrong. She said it just like that—dead wrong. Then she pulled out a glass milk bottle that had lots of cash shoved in it. “This is my bank account and it works just fine, thank you very much.” I wanted to ask her a million questions about how she lived like that and didn’t she feel like she was missing out or wasn’t she worried someone would break in and steal her money. She didn’t get to travel or buy new things, but I kind of knew the answer she would have given. Her small life made her happy. Her special life was all she needed.
Ms. Harrison, Justine never had one bit of plastic surgery her whole life. I didn’t ask her that, but I just know it’s true. I mean, if you’re a woman who keeps all your money in a glass milk bottle, then you don’t have the resources or the inclination for plastic surgery. She was eighty years old with so many wrinkles, even on places that I didn’t know you could get wrinkles, like on her forearms. Each one fascinated me. She reminded me so much of the lead actress in Harold and Maude. Have you seen that movie? If you haven’t you really should. You’d like it. Anyway, Justine had that same spirit of acceptance, that same adorableness that Ruth Gordon possessed. We are wrong if we think old people are freaky and pathetic. Well, I guess some of them can be. Just like some young people can be freaky and pathetic.
At the end of lunch, before we walked back to meet the group, Justine wrote down her address and said we could be pen pals. She said she had been wanting to write letters to someone in another country and thought I would do just fine, thank you very much.
After my lunch with Justine, we saw the Christopher Marlowe theatre, and we learned about how Canterbury got a new archbishop in 2003. When I read the Canterbury Tales again at some point in my life, I will have a whole new set of pictures in my head about the setting of those stories.
For my room at home, I was able to find a snow globe featuring the Canterbury Cathedral and some postcards of cobblestone alleys. When I look at them in the future, they’ll remind me of