Eighty-Three Years and No Bud

Which is a sentence I honestly didn’t expect to write this year. Or ever, probably.

It was Natalie Brooks who talked me into it. We got talking a few days ago, and I mentioned that I’d been spending too much time at home lately. She asked if I had any plans for Pearl Week. I said no, and somehow, about fifteen minutes later, I was signed up to help at the Community Breakfast.

Natalie has this way of asking you to do something that makes it sound like you’ve already agreed. She’s a nurse, which probably explains a lot.

Anyway, this morning I found myself carrying coffee around a room full of people who were mostly old enough to remember when my parents were young. There were long tables with white tablecloths, little gold decorations, flowers, and enough pastries to feed half the university. Someone had put on music that I think was supposed to be cheerful, although I didn’t recognize a single song.

I was nervous at first. I didn’t really know what to say to anyone. I kept asking people if they wanted more coffee, including one gentleman who had literally just watched me fill his cup.

Then I met Mrs. Whitaker.

She’s eighty-three. She’s lived in Silverdale her entire life, and she told me this within about thirty seconds of sitting down beside her. Apparently, her parents lived three streets from where she was born, she married a local boy, raised three children here, and has never seen a particularly good reason to move anywhere else.

She asked how old I was.

“Nineteen.”

“Oh, good Lord,” she said. “I’ve got sweaters older than you.”

I liked her immediately.

We talked for almost an hour. She told me about the old downtown, about dances at the university, about a bakery that closed before I was born, and about her husband, Walter, who died six years ago.

They were married for fifty-four years.

I actually asked her to repeat that.

“Fifty-four?”

“Yes, dear. And he still couldn’t remember which drawer we kept the dish towels in.”

I laughed, but I kept thinking about that number.

Fifty-four years.

She’d managed to stay with the same person for fifty-four years without GRACE, without a Bud, without anything telling her what to say or when to say it.

And here I am, nineteen years old, with all that information sitting right behind my eyes, and I couldn’t even make a relationship last two years.

I know that’s probably not a fair comparison. She’d had a whole lifetime with Walter. Maybe they’d had terrible arguments. Maybe there were years when they barely liked each other. I didn’t ask.

But I did wonder, just for a second, what exactly GRACE was supposed to be helping me with if it couldn’t help me keep the one person I wanted to keep.

Then Mrs. Whitaker asked if I’d pass the butter, and that was the end of my great philosophical moment.

A little later, she asked me about GRACE.

Not what my score was, which was nice. She wanted to know what the little thing in my head actually did.

I tried explaining the Bud. How it connects to GRACE, how it gives us information and suggestions, and how you sort of get used to having things appear in your vision.

She looked completely horrified.

“You mean while you’re walking around?”

“Yeah.”

“And when you’re eating?”

“Sometimes.”

“And when you’re kissing a boy?”

I nearly choked on my orange juice.

I said it wasn’t quite like that, and that you could ignore things if you wanted to. Which is true. Mostly.

She asked what kind of things it told me.

That’s where it got complicated.

I explained some of the general stuff, like reminders and wellbeing information, but obviously there were things I couldn’t tell her. I kept trying to find ways to explain it without explaining too much, which made me sound like I didn’t understand it myself.

Eventually I said, “It can help you understand people better. Like, sometimes it gives you suggestions about relationships.”

She stared at me.

“Relationships?”

“Yeah. Like how to communicate better.”

She took a very slow sip of coffee.

“Honey, I managed to keep Walter under control for fifty-four years without a computer in my head.”

I laughed so hard that the woman across from us turned around.

Mrs. Whitaker wasn’t finished.

“If I wanted Walter to do something, I’d just ask him. If that didn’t work, I’d ask him again. And if that didn’t work, I’d tell his mother.”

Apparently that worked every time.

I told her GRACE was a little more sophisticated than that.

She said, “Well, I should hope so, dear. Walter’s mother has been dead since 1987.”

I think I love this woman.

She asked whether I’d ever considered getting rid of my Bud. I told her it wasn’t really something I thought about.

“Well, you should think about things occasionally,” she said. “It’s quite useful.”

I couldn’t tell whether she was joking.

Before I left, she asked if I had a boyfriend.

I told her not anymore.

She didn’t ask what happened or tell me I’d find somebody else. She just nodded and said, “That’s all right. Nineteen is a perfectly good age to have no idea what you’re doing.”

Then she handed me the last pastry from her plate because she thought I looked hungry.

I hadn’t realized how much I needed someone to say something like that.

I’ve been thinking about our conversation all afternoon. Especially the part about Walter.

I wanted to ask her whether she ever worried about losing him when they were young. Whether she knew, at nineteen, that she’d found the person she was going to spend fifty-four years with. Whether she ever sat by the phone waiting for him to call.

But I didn’t.

Maybe next time.

I don’t know. I’ve spent so much time recently thinking about one person who doesn’t want to talk to me anymore. And today I sat beside someone who had eighty-three years of stories and was genuinely happy to spend an hour telling some of them to me.

She didn’t care about my score. She didn’t understand my Bud. She didn’t even know you could read people’s posts on this site. When I told her I sometimes wrote things here, she asked if it was like sending a letter to the newspaper.

I said, “Sort of.”

Honestly, that might be the best description anyone has given me.

I’m volunteering again at the Garden Festival later this week. Mrs. Whitaker said she’d be there if the weather was nice, and she expects me to come find her.

So I will.

Also, if anyone from the Pearl Week committee is reading this, please tell whoever made those little cinnamon pastries that they were amazing.

And Natalie, if you’re reading this, thank you for talking me into it. ❤️