GUESTS, GOSSIP, GRANNY

Mrs. Breck, small, extrovert, cheery, of good, singing voice, was
the only street inhabitant besides Aunt M., three blocks up, who would,
and could, open our door and walk in without waiting to be asked.

She always shouted a brisk greeting or opening remark: "Aw Granny, ken
who's deid?" ("Oh Gran, do you know who has just died?")

Mrs. Breck kept Granny informed about or in touch with local gossip
and trivia or, to be more precise: Who of my Granny's contemporaries
had just died. Mrs. Breck did not realize that, everyday, she was a
constant and crushing reminder to Granny of Granny's own mortality and
her being, statistically, not too far away from death.

She was, also, an emissary of a vague, downtown people, called "They."
"'They' say that.... 'They' are all talking about.... 'They' tell me
there's a lot of that going about."

Mornings, she would hurdle our back fence for morning tea--3 cups and
3 biscuits-- and gossip. Afternoons, my Granny would painfully scale
the back fence for afternoon tea--3 + 3--and more gossip. She was my
Granny's best pal.

After her widowhood (and after her son, Tim, got married), Mrs. Breck
got her unmarried brother-in-law, Bobby, to move in as lodger, to cut
grass and do chores.

Life became comfortable with the extra income, although Mrs. Breck
still rose at 5 am daily to clean the local, elementary school.

Bobby was a quiet, homey-type guy, who lavished "favorite uncle"-type
presents on his many nieces and grandnieces, etc. He also may have been
sexually repressed, for his taste in literature ran to lurid, sexy
Mickey Spillane -, Jacqueline Suzanne - type, railway-station-stall
mush like "Naked Quarry" or "The Blonde Wore Pink."

I can still remember the lilting, sensuous prose: "A hot veil of
passion passed over his head as he slid his hand along her silken
thighs."

Most of these books finished up on my parent's night-time, bedside
table and, inevitably, landed right into my very, own hands. I also
remember being disappointed, slightly, in my parents, for their
succumbing to such stuff.

But, for such books, I was, always, also grateful. Next to the big,
illustrated, 20-year old, medical volume, such books as these were the
only, convenient source on "what, exactly, people had and what,
exactly, for."