Penelope Spark

I read her obituary yesterday. Penelope Spark… seventy seven and a half years old. Don’t ask me about the half. Penelope wrote her own obituary and she was into half-sizes, three-quarters and half-lives. She was always like a little child, and she loved her job as an actuary for a major insurance company. She worked from home, which she had done for years…  long before Covid hit and forced everyone inside. The insurance company didn’t care if she went into her office or stayed home. Penelope was that good with numbers… she made the company a mighty good profit predicting the best used by, and past due dates of people as if a they were a grocery product. 

Anyway, Penelope never married. In fact, she never left her house on West Wicker Lane. Never married… never vacationed… never, never… the one thing she always? She’d go on a shoe binge. Whether by catalogue or later through on-line shopping, she’d buy an assortment of shoes. Over the years? Hundreds. She’d buy loafers, and clogs, and gladiators… wedges, and open toe… kitten heel and stiletto… jellies… you name it, she bought them, and I’d deliver them.  Then, what she ‘always’ then returned to the nevers’ – she never wore any of them. Needless to say, Penelope had a massive shoe closest, where she’d open the box, set the shoes in and lean the box back so that she could see them. Then, she’d sit on a chair, and dream of the places that she’d walk wearing them. I asked her about her stories.. where she came up with them. She said that she let the soul and the style of the shoe dictate her adventures. She felt most comfortable in the peeping toe, not so much the stiletto. She’d then write out her adventure and put her story in the shoebox. She’d then put the cover on, write the date, and on the anniversary date – every year after that, she’d go back and read it. 

Penelope… Penelope… seventy-seven and a half. Yes, well, about those shoes – did I mention that she always bought them two-sized too small? Yep. It’s true. She said that all of those of the shoes she bought that were her size? Ugly. All she ever wore was a pair of moccasins, which she wore to her grave in her specially built coffin fashioned after a shoebox. Never in my life have I met anyone like Penelope Spark.