Sometimes you have to pick your battles.
So when her son Sam shouted from the basement "Just a minute!" for the third time that Friday morning, Christina Harding didn’t shout back or stomp down the stairs after him. Instead, she sat down to finish her tea. It was clear that it would take a miracle now to get him on his bus to St. Emilion High School, and this morning she didn’t have a miracle in her.
Morph, the huge Burmese Mountain Dog who was the Harding family’s only pet lumbered over to her. As usual, Christina wondered how something so big could be so gentle. Morph’s head was nearly at her shoulders where she sat. He stared at her with his big, round eyes which managed to simultaneously look both sad and hopeful.
"Not this morning Morph," she said, "We’ll go for a walk when I get back."
His ears drooped, and he flopped himself down beside her with a huff.
"No, really. We’ll go for a walk tonight." Even as she said this she knew that the odds were against it, however. Lately it seemed like she never had time for anything. She and Morph both needed to get more exercise, but with her husband and her both working, and a son to raise, exercise seemed to always slip off her task list.
She finished her last sip of tea just as Sam came barreling up the stairs shouting, "Mom, is my lunch ready? I gotta go. I’m going to miss my bus!"
Christina sighed. "Relax," she said, "You’ve already missed it. Come on, I’ll drive you."
Driving Sam to school would mean that she had to get up and get going, at least. This was a good thing, since even though Fridays were ostensibly her day off in the four-day week she worked at Dynamic Systems -- a small Ottawa high tech firm -- she often received a call to come in when they were in crunch mode, as they seemed to perpetually be. Of course if she wasn’t home to get the call...
Monday she would plead unspecified "running around" and "errands" but today her plan was to do no running at all. Today was going to be a me-day, with her first stop being the Mystery Manor.
The Mystery Manor was a small, independently owned book store in "the Glebe" a trendy part of the city which was populated in equal portions by students from nearby Carleton University and yuppies, those proverbial young, socially-conscious, ecologically-friendly urban professionals that Christina always found particularly frustrating.
Nestled in among the recycling supply stores, child-safe toyshops, and trendy coffee bars was a tired looking, rundown, brownstone house with a carved wood sign depicting a magnifying glass. When Christina opened the door to the Mystery Manor, Marissa Campbell, the proprietor, waved at her from the Sherlock Holmes section where she was helping a customer. Christina waved back, then headed through the archway that lead to the “sitting room” and over to the small table that held the tea service. Marissa, like Christina, was an avid tea drinker, and she always had an ample supply of T.G.F.O.P Darjeeling and Lapsang Souchong waiting. After filling the kettle with water and plugged it in, Christina plunked herself down on one of the large, overstuffed, chintz armchairs and pulled the book she was currently reading out of her handbag, along with a massive pile of wool that was slowly being turned into a sweater for her husband.