When Vera needed to buy store-bought glasses with a higher magnification or if she were compelled to go to a one-hundred-and-fifty-watt bulb, she vowed she would make an appointment with Dr. Duane Carper, the cute young eye doctor in Wheeling. Vera’s friend Esther Wigton constantly raved about Dr. Carper since seeing him a month ago. Vera was sure Esther had a crush on the eye doctor. When Vera was a young girl she could never have imagined a woman of sixty-plus years having a crush on anyone. She still couldn’t imagine it. Women of her age and Esther’s were much too old for those kinds of shenanigans. True, Esther Wigton was younger than she. Esther was in her midsixties. About the age Vera was when she met John. But Vera got over it real quick and Esther hadn’t gotten over anything. In fact, she was still acting downright childish. An example of this had happened just the other day at the Inn of the Sixth Happiness Tea & Sandwich Shop.

Esther said to Vera, “God, Dr. Carper’s sexy.”

“My goodness, Esther, Dr. Carper must be half your age!” said Vera.

“What’s age have to do with it? Duane’s a man and I’m a woman, for God’s sake.”

“Now it’s Duane, is it?”

“Oh, control yourself, Vera. I know how the subject of sex gets you all riled up.”

“No, you control yourself, Esther,” whispered Vera. “People at the other tables can hear you.”

“Oh, Vera, for heaven’s sake. You’re such a prude. So someone overhears us. So what?”

“So what?”

“Yes, so what? What’s wrong with getting a little at our age? Or at least dreaming about getting a little?”

“This entire conversation is absurd.”

“It’ll all stop being absurd, Vera, when you get the hots for some young man.”

“Get the hots. Honestly, Esther.”

Was that it? Had she gotten “the hots” for John?

“You’ll see, Vera. You’ll find yourself doing things you never imagined you would do in your life. That is, if you ever meet a younger man who gets your blood boiling.”

“Honestly, Esther. Gets my blood boiling. You are something.”

After making herself comfortable in her armchair, with a cup of tea sitting on the table beside her, Vera would take an encyclopedia from the bookcase, sniff its leather cover, then open the book and sniff the first page. She never tired of these delicious and familiar smells. After her sniffs, she usually examined the entire volume from cover to cover, riffling through its pages, lost in a wonderful world of facts and figures, historical data, exotic photographs, and maps and charts until something caught her eye. Then she would stop and read and read and read. She daydreamed of the faraway cities and countries she came across that she would never see, places with magical names like Al Jizah, Timbuktu, and Kilimanjaro.

“So much to read, so little time to do it,” Vera often said aloud.