10.09.2024
Marguerite's Pearl of Wisdom
“Use ‘em, or lose ‘em! That, gorgeous, is how I bore all the people in the shops… I wake ‘em up!” she said, laughing simultaneously.
She appeared to gauge me with an incisive eye, drew attention and dazzled all those about us with her sizzling cheer. My cheeks most definitely had risen at her sudden appearance and curious pronouncement because almost immediately she turned and went quickly through the sauntering Saturday morning shopper crowd. Her manoeuvring figure slipped from sight like a card shuffled back into the deck. She tooted again, “Use ‘em…or lose ‘em!”
Though we had never met, she had spoken familiarly, with relish and certitude, in a delicious, splashy manner, as if we had been tight for years. On those few words, dashed out as if urgently pasting up a final-appearance poster, I felt her electric zip-a-dee-doo-dah delight for life. It wasn’t as if I’d been accosted, it was more in the manner that she had deigned that that very moment was to be a moment, the moment for who ever might be there before her. Who was not important. That it was some one that she could look into, eye-to-eye, seemed all she required. Her eyes were as bright as LEDs flashing NOW OPEN! And it was I who was in her ‘momentary-friendship firing line’ that day on the teeming concourse of a palace-of-retail.
The truth is, there was a little bit more to our interaction. From behind a trestle table, I was plying my trade, making the pitch with a sandwich board, a point-of-sale display, and a modest tower of product for passersby to be sold the idea of picking up my fiction. In the act of selling, there’s anxiety, a heightened sensing, a positive projection, magnetism, an intoxication, adrenalin, engagement, absorption into a flow… and sometimes, when the flow (of sales) stutters, there might be an incantation! The anticipatory signing-hand finger-cramp is a shocking professional hazard! And a good reason to be ambidextrous!
But all that, I’m sure, wouldn’t register on the character whose presence sparkled below a halo of charms. Here’s the thing: at that moment, I was high on the flow of a selling streak. When Marguerite swung by and locked-on for that few seconds, asking what’s all this? (the table, signs, books), my slightly fragmented response received her passionate moral support and lead to her aforementioned declamation. I had been instantly seduced by her life-force and could see how her energy—apparently in a perpetual state of brimming—might be spread, as if an inoculation, or as an act of emotional re-provisioning for whomever she connected with.
Her intensity of action, and simplicity of benefaction remained with me, and lit a fuse of curiosity, leaving me only imagination to fill in the blanks of Marguerite…
Somewhere up high beyond the busy arterial out front—under reconstruction the last forty years—is where I imagine she lives. I also see that her home, itself, bares her smile and… her cheek. On the upward zig-zag pathway to its concocted front door, are lipstick red lips made by crescents of geraniums, twinned in perfect opposing registration—pert as they were ever meant to be—complete with their zestful nature exercising a duty to impress whoever is near. On the walk-up, these crescents are visible for only a moment as, on a beat of adrenalin, they shift in perspective. The lips depart and become blooms again, back to work, busy being beautiful, a silent singing bastion of love’s colour—always springtime. Marguerite’s raison d’être is, it seems, to plant a jolt of glee into strangers, a hit-and-run inamorata who heralds the last drift of Night Jasmine.
A half-round awning, slapped back against brunette brick, exclaims surprise, its mascara-black stripes Marguerite’s long arrayed lashes. Looking out beyond, her other window, shades a chrysanthemum-green iris. Here on the hill is her face, which pouts a smile that’s all in the eyes, honest, joyous, facing all weathers, perhaps more so on leaden grey days, when her gleam can lift off any weight. But the early sun, especially, draws her out, though barely competes because her indomitability is her passkey through the personal space divide. She marches her street, down from the rise, once more to be amongst her shop town strangers, who know she will be there to tell them again, with an ancient assuredness to use ‘em, or lose ‘em!
She stokes self-respect in benefit of others, relishes to brandish her way across Fog Hill Road, trots the zebra, and harvests the eyes of the stop ’n’ go collar and tie crowd, for she is alive, and they are in their chains. For Marguerite’s natural advantage is she’s finished with the caring… she’s busy with her giving, and we the needy are the endless.
Every day, on errands, or not, she slips through the sliding glass entrance, goes darting and weaving, around and up levels, to the back and then ‘round again. And as if from the air, from giant long skylights, escalators descending, backlit she knocks the scowls down. Ever tall on fine ankles, she dances on balls of small sandalled feet, bright painted nails, through gesturing wrists, she dances, and dances, though never a dancer. Singing her tune through her sinews and soul, Marguerite, a wellspring of faculties, magic, and beauty, is ninety years old. Use it, or lose it!
TA