PAST LIFE DIARY 2 - Story 415 - A few dozen (Jeremy)

A FEW DOZEN (Jeremy)

I'm looking down at my pants. They're slightly flared but not too much, and a hideous color - something between brown and gray. They're that material you don't need to iron. What's it called? - Acrylic? My shoes are an equally dull color, but you can only see the tip cause the flared ends of the pants hang over them. I do like the feel of my shoes having a bit of a thick sole. I'm wearing a narrow fitted shirt with half sleeves, off-white, in a stretchy fabric with a textured pattern. I quite like it, and I leave the top buttons open. I'm wearing my thin, metal framed glasses and my bulky wrist watch. I'm at a store with a group of… girls. They sell magazines here. It seems like the same stationary supplies store I saw in another session. Molly's here. She refuses to wear her glasses nowadays, says they look hideous. She doesn't want the glasses to repel boys. I told her, joking, that she gotta be sure she doesn't oversee boys precisely cause she's not wearing her glasses. Penny's here too, as well as Nellie and Liz. Penz has her hair bleached now to a shade of, I don't know – copper, I guess. It's a relief they're all letting it stand as comes naturally instead of trying to make it "behave" like they used to. The heated discussions and situations of outright panic about their hair, hair products, and combs were not something I was equipped to deal with as a father. It's only my two oldest that had this hair obsession, though, but now the fashion of "elegance" has changed, and voila! Molly doesn't care at all. She's sure her hair looks amazing no matter what, and I'm not gonna be the one to spoil the peace by contradicting that! She does have the fortune - the jackpot, according to Nelson (Nellie) - of having wavy hair rather than Nellie's "dry bush". Lizzy's a bit of a problem, though, cause she pulls her hair back tight, but it has grown quite thin, so I advised her to just let it free. Nellie's wearing a black two-piece (skirt and jacket) which makes her look older. She doesn't work in an office, but she likes to dress like she does. I'm here to have a few copies printed with an enlarged family picture and some text. It's for a family reunion party, - my sister, like me, has come back to live in Tennessee - and it's supposed to look like a small newspaper. My mom's the one that put money aside for this family reunion. I hand the black and white picture with scalloped edges to the lady from the store. She places the picture on the counter and illustrates what the end result will look like. I guess she must be in her thirties. She has long, black hair and a smile which makes her quite lovable. Now, the question is how many copies we need. Sixty four, I suggest. One of my daughters argues that it's not a round number. I believe sixty four is an amount of dozens, and, though open to correction, I rather hope to find out that measuring in dozens is still used for such things. Sixty four is a number of dozens, right? Thirty two… I better check with Penny; she's good with numbers. "Just go with seventy" she says, sparing me the fact that 64 can not be divided by a dozen. "Seventy?" the lady asks, obviously aware that I'm the one that gives the final word even though I can't count. "Seventy" I say, but then, keeping up the notion that I'm a man in favor of good old fashioned dozens, I add "unless you want dozens". I'm reasonable certain that 72 holds a number of dozens. But, I'll have to buy a whole bunch of roses and then count them before I can be entirely sure of that!