It’s a bust.

Writing group is over for the season. We’ll meet again, I know where, and I know when, but it won’t be until mid-September, which saddens me. There was a sudden downpour as we wrote, which prompted Janice to jump up and close windows. One of our exercises was to tell the story inspired by a photograph. Janice gets old books delivered to her regularly, and there are often ancient daguerreotypes between the leaves of tomes pulled from shelves of deceased seniors, little surprises that fall out from between yellowing and dog-eared pages. She saves them and uses them for occasions such as these, writing group exercises.

My photo was of two men in suits standing on either side of a small table with a potted plant. It was very likely taken in the photographer’s studio, but I chose to invent a funeral parlour as the setting, and one of the men had in his hand a rolled up bundle of paper, which I pretended was a will. This allowed me to invent a whole story about two brothers reunited for their father’s funeral, deciding the fate of his business. It wasn’t a particularly great piece of writing, but what I noticed while I was reading it, or more like when I stopped, was how totally sucked in I was to my narrative, and I realized that my listeners were too. Interesting. Either I write well, or I have a good delivery.

In the morning I drove to the mall where I spent vast sums of money on various and sundry. The main focus of the excursion was to buy Hubby’s Father’s Day gift, the first two seasons of TraiIer Park B0ys, and to take advantage of the promotion card I’d received in the mail from my favourite cosmetics store, where I got bust cream at two for the price of one (I can hear the sniggering in the audience already), carmine lipstick for Little Princess at 40% off, two shades of eyeshadow (buy one colour, get the second free) and received a gift of my choice of bubble bath/shower gel and a loofah sponge. I also filled up my third preferred customer card and was entitled to any product free up to $90, so I opted for a $120 month-long night cream treatment, having to pay the $30 difference, but I thought I got the better of the bargain. Okay, I admit it, I spend way too much on my face (and bust).

I also bought a strapless brassiere that was on special and herbal supplements which are supposed to help me eliminate the fluid I am retaining. A lengthy conversation was had in the health-food store with the unilingual francophone man about me and my water-retention problem, and I’m pretty proud of myself for not screaming at him, “Speak English, dammit!”

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