Strangers you learn to love

Press, 5 March 1988, Page 16

Strangers you learn to love

Eccentrics, unlike great

beauties, age well. While in their youth they may be variously described as barmy/bonkers /certifiable /dingbats or mad as a gumtree full of galahs they emerge in their prime to be warmly hailed as zany/original or amusing. i !

Peer pressure is formidable in young people. If you are not like everyone else,! you are ! regarded, even by people who do not bear you the remotest ! ill-will, J as strange or peculiar. Like minds are attracted, others shy away. But the advantage of growing older (about the only advantage) is that personal confidence : increases along with the years. Maturing confidence transforms the eccentric. Their idiosyncrasies, once so threatening, become endearing. ; For as long as I have known Dudley, she has never, never behaved

quite like anyone else. If she ever did try, she gave up long ago. Who else would phone for some envelopes and end up with a foster child? I recognised a like mind way back when we met in adjoining beds in school and Dud-

ley leaned over and asked ... “Are you brainy?” Tell me a better way to put the nervous newcomer at ease? j. ; !

Although she graduated, she never practised law. Her vocation is whodunits. She reads so many, she has to keep the titles on computer. Dudley and I arrange to meet at a second-hand bookshop where I arrive to find her holding forth from the top of a ladder, arming herself with scads and scads of detective novels and complaining non-stop that she could write better herself.

Weighed down by whodunits, Dudley and I go to select ohe of two pairs of shoes she has had put aside in a store fabled for its old-fashioned service.

The shoes are European imports of the sturdy sensible kind which cost the earth and look identical. I am able to tell them apart because one pair is black and the other

One lot costs $2ll, and the other $230. ; I

The girls hate them. “They wish I’d wear proper shoes like everyone else,” she says. (A bit of cheap flash obviously impresses her three teenage daughters more than a formidable price tag.)

“But I never wear anything else,” says Dudley clearly not intimidated. “I’ve got four pairs at home. They last for ages.” "Yes,” the salesperson enthuses. "I had a lady in this week buying new Reikiers to replace her old ones which she paid for in pounds, i shillings and pence.” Twenty-one years ago!

“At this rate,” I remark, “this lot should; see you out.” Dudley is delighted. She selects one j pair and makes out a cheque for $230.

“Of course, they don’t fit,” she says. ; | “Well why buy them?" "Your feet grow as you get older,” she says, airily

stuffing them in with the detective novels as she departs in a taxi to watch the cricket.

Pretty soon, a toll call comes from Dudley. Absolutely jubilant. She has arived home with two left shoes.

Now any other out-of-town customer sent on her way with odd shoes from a store fabled for its old-fashioned service would have done her nana!

Not Dudley. This is merely a sign to her from above that she was meant to buy both pairs. A cheque for $2ll for the two right feet is dispatched by return post. Although more than a mite confusing when you are young, the "original” is well worth getting to know. They endure and long-term they are great value.

When Dudley writes her whodunit, and I don’t doubt she will one day, I bet nobody will be able to guajt the ending.

Eccentrics grow endearing