June 11, 2023—
Our friend grilled sausages and Dr. Praeger’s veggie burgers last night, and I dined in a lawn chair next to her mom. A neighbor asked her, 87, where she was from. Originally? Scotland. She emigrated to Rochester and got a job at Kodak, where she met her future husband, from Ireland.
She had put the film on the reel in 1961 that captured Enos, the first chimp to orbit the earth, in space. “My one claim to fame,” she chuckled. My lawn chair was low to the patio, so I stared at her peony-pink socks in white Nikes. Before it got dark, she drove herself home.
Photo: My friend’s chicken (“Shelly?”), disappointed my phone wasn’t a handful of blueberries.