The coffee shop

I sat down with the ladies from Pilates and enjoyed a well deserved cup of coffee in Neros. We started talking about jigsaws for some reason and turning to one of the ladies there I asked her if she enjoyed them. She said no, not unless it was something like a psychedelic. I looked at this woman in her early seventies and inwardly smiled. I had fallen into the classic trap—I had presumed old age went with no life, rather than picking up on the fact she would have been one of the older girls at the Beatles concerts, and she would have been one of the ones screaming. She would have been part of the love, peace and free spirit brigade, with flowers in her hair, big swirly patterns on flowing dresses or trousers, tight skimpy tops and dark eye make-up. She would have been one of the young women I would have looked up to as a young teenager and wanted to emulate. And yet here we were all those years later chattering about this and that and we had both removed each other’s pasts and replacing it with nothing, save for the belief they had lived a life similar to those of people in our family who had been of that age when we were younger, in our prime.
I thought back to my great aunts and uncles when they had been her age and how staid they were, reflecting the generation of Victorian values which were still prevalent in the late 50s and 60s. I had inadvertently given her the same values. Ouch! She was so different and if I had time to enquire I bet she had a few stories to tell.
You know we do this with people; think of our mothers. How many of us as children couldn’t imagine them ever having sex, but lets face, it for us to be here, they have had to have done it at least once!
I sat back and drank some coffee, re-aligned my thoughts and presumptions and gave her credit for the possibility of having had a full and adventurous life. I imagined her in the flowing clothes and listening to the 60s music.
Yes, I could be envious of her again, just as I had been all those years ago, when I was too young and self conscious to be as loud and outrageous as she had probably been. No, she didn’t like jigsaws, she much preferred Sudoku.