Miss Roberta, 94, lives alone in a house down the road. She brought dessert when she came to dinner on Christmas Eve, thanks to a barter gone wrong.
Roberta and I often discuss how different things were back when she was growing up on a ranch. These days, people prefer to buy their fruit in the supermarket. There are apple trees all through town, but those apples are piled in the alleyways for the bears to eat while people buy apples in the grocery store shipped all the way from Washington State. She just can’t understand it.
As it happens, the local bakery Bread can use any amount of local fruit with no notice, but they don’t pay: they let you have lots of bread and pastries for free. They’ll barter but they won’t buy.
When Roberta was 92, she got fixated on the dual ideas that her sour cherries were worth $40, and that the bakery would buy them. There was nothing to say about it. She paid her 65 year old handyman to strip the tree-he didn’t say a word–and I took them to the bakery. I couldn’t give her cash because then she’d be wanting me to sell her cherries next summer too, so I gave the cherries to the bakery and bought Roberta a $40 gift certificate.
Roberta is about 4′8″ and 95 pounds. She’s not a big eater and doesn’t go to the bakery. The gift certificate sat in her drawer for two years, and I remembered it after I invited her over for Christmas Eve dinner.
I offered to pick up a fancy bakery dessert if she wanted to use the gift certificate, and she was tickled by the thought. She ruffled through her desk looking for that two-year-old certificate, but it wasn’t there. And then she opened the top drawer of her dresser, and pulled it right out. At 94, she knew this day would come, and she was right.
I picked her up a Linzertorte for 12 ($18), and the gift certificate went back in her dresser drawer for another year. Miss Roberta is prepared for nearly all occasions.
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