Heather

“My wife’s sister Pauline gave her this thermos,” he said, as he rubbed his fingers across the letters. “She got it from sending in cigarette box lids or something. She was a pack a day smoker, Pauline was. My wife Alma always told her she was going to smoke her way into the grave but Pauline would just laugh and say smoking was part of her back-up career plan. ‘It’s about time there ought to be a Marlboro woman,’ she used to say. ‘And I think I’m the one to give that cowboy a run for his money.’ Anyway, you used to be able to collect the boxes and save up the points to get gifts and she clipped them as reverently as some people highlight Bible verses. Then she and my Alma would pour over that catalog like gamblers examining a race book as if the decision of how to use those box points was going to make or break their fortune. Scarf or hat? Cigarette lighter or ashtray? Mug or Thermos? They wrestled over that last one for weeks. Alma said, ‘No use in getting a mug, a mug without a thermos is like a bowl without soup.’ Didn’t really make sense to me, seems like a thermos and a mug are both like the bowl but Alma could argue Jesus off the cross and into a bar if she set her mind to it so Pauline gave in, so thermos it was. Then wouldn’t you know it when that thermos came in the post they had accidentally sent two. You would have thought that Jesus dropped the extra thermos in the mail himself the way they went on about it. ‘Divine intervention,’ they said, and they filled them with coffee or lemonade, dragging them to work or picnics as if they were Gucci pocketbooks. Don’t even know why Alma wanted that. She hated cigarettes. She only smoked one cigarette her whole life. Then she was the one to get the cancer. She said that one cigarette must have been the one that got her. Pauline said it should have been her, said God must have gotten confused and picked the wrong twin seeing as they looked alike until the day Alma got sick. I don’t know, I always thought maybe she picked something up from looking through all those catalogs, or from drinking from that Thermos or something. I know it doesn’t make sense but I guess you just want something to blame and I guess this Thermos is as good as anything. I can’t drink from it but I can’t throw it out either. So I guess it’s just going to sit here. I heard a fellow on the radio say that plastic can outlive a person and that just doesn’t feel right to me, seems like we’d be better off with people than plastic. I mean what good is a bowl without soup?