All things considered

     In my little golf league here in Florida (a friend has kindly allowed me access to the group from her housing complex), I play with a rotating group of people.

This week I found myself in a twosome, just me and a woman in her mid-eighties, who I’ve played with before. Her hair is white, her smile sweet, and she hits the ball not far, but unerringly right down the middle every time. Working your way through nine holes with only one other person creates lots of time for conversation.

     As we set off in our cart, she asked me what I was writing and I told her I’d just finished a chapter in which someone hurled dog poo into a town meeting.

     A minute went by and she said quietly. “I’ve done that.”  I turned to this small woman who it was easier to picture in a gingham apron pulling cookies from an oven and said, “You what?”

     With a little smile she said, “I put it in someone’s mailbox.” Seems she’d had a neighbor with not only a dog, but a bad case of denial.

     I learned more about her as we waited for golfers ahead of us.  She not only painted, but once had her own studio where they’d lived before. In her words, she missed it a little, “being a kind of big fish in a small pond,” but her husband had wanted to retire in Florida.

     She really got my attention when I learned her son-in-law is a national reporter in Washington D.C. for National Public Radio, someone I’ve listened to for years and years, someone of Cokie Roberts status.

     Excited by this “six degrees of separation,” I later tried to brag to two different people here of having found out that I knew so-and-so’s mother-in-law.

The first person, when asked if they listened to NPR, gave me a flat “No.”

The second said curtly, “Nope. Never NPR.”

Whoops. Sometimes I forget where I am.