I am dented. My goodness, but the hygenist was a talker.
I also got to talk to an extremely cool old lady! Her name is Evelyn, and she moved up here with her family in 1949. Her husband was a carpenter and somebody told him if he came up here, he’d have a job, and Evelyn thought they should do it, but he just didn’t know how they could afford to. So one day at lunch he was talking to a friend of his, an older man, about this job in Alaska and how Evelyn was just set on going, but he just didn’t know how they were going to afford it.
And his friend took out his wallet and took out five one hundred dollar bills and reached over and tucked them in the husband’s hatband and said, “You go to Alaska. It’ll be the best move you ever made.”
Later they were back for a funeral, and the husband tried to pay the guy back and he refused to take the money. He said it was the best thing he’d ever done, that the husband looked like a whole new person. So that was how they came to Alaska. Isn’t that cool? *beam*
And she told me a story about her husband’s parents. His father was French and apparently spoke seven languages, but English wasn’t particularly one of them. He spoke enough that she could understand his stories, though, or at least they managed to get by. He told her about his first marriage and the twins and the daughter he’d had, but the twins and his first wife died of smallpox and the daughter died in her twenties, and apparently none of his children knew that story, because they never talked to him. They all knew about the daughter, but they had no idea there’d been twins or anything.
It was pretty neat talking to her. She was an old liberal. She said something about not liking the President, and I said, “Oh, don’t get me started,” and she lit right up and said to her daughter, “I’ve got a buddy here!” *more beaming* She said she’d been talking politics a couple of years ago with a friend of hers who was about her age, and the woman admitted she’d never voted and wasn’t even registered to vote. Evelyn said, “Well, what’re you complaining for, then!” and grabbed the woman’s PFD application and turned it to the voter registration page and made her fill it out. And know what? The next election, the woman voted! And told Evelyn, and said, “*Now* I can complain!” *beam* Isn’t that *cool*?!