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| Iris Brown |
As a youngster, I could never really understand why Iris took note of
me or even remembered my name for that matter.
But after knowing Iris for a while, I came to understand that Iris didn't just meet people, she made lifelong friends.
There was something about her that made it easy to talk to her – she showed
deep interest in other people and freely talked about her own life and
circumstances as well.
When I was in my late teens or early twenties, I was hired at J. C.
Penney in the catalog department, which was side by side with the credit
department, where Iris worked at the time.
We were scheduled together frequently.
One particular night, when a blizzard raged all around us, we stood at
the catalog counter and gazed out the side door at the white flakes swirling
around in the darkness. It had been
hours since we’d seen a customer. Out of
desperation for something to do, we made a huge dot game – you know, the whole
page is filled with dots, and you try to connect them together into boxes,
filling them in with your initial. Whoever
gets the most boxes wins. We entertained
ourselves for a while with that, and when our shifts ended we shoved it under
the cash register for safe keeping until next time. Well, when “next time” rolled around, we
discovered our game was missing – apparently someone had found it – hopefully not
our supervisor - with all the “K’s” and “I’s” written all over it, there was no
way we could plead innocence!
No matter how mundane the situation, experiencing it with Iris took it
to a whole new level. One day as I was
just getting home from class at Huron College, I got a phone call from
Iris. She was stranded by the mall, her
car having run out of gas and was stalled on the street. I drove over there and picked her up, and we
laughed about it all the way to the gas station, where we realized neither of
us had a gas can! So we laughed all the
way to the store to purchase one, then back to the gas station. Everyone we encountered along the way probably
thought we’d been drinking! We continued
to laugh about the whole situation for quite some time afterward.
Years later, after my family and I moved to Minnesota, I got a call
from Iris saying she’d be coming through my town and did I have a bed available
for her for a couple of nights. Well, of
course I did! One of the days during her visit I was
supposed to meet with a small sewing group at our church, and Iris joined us. We worked together on my quilting project,
and had a great time. She fit in just
perfectly with our tiny group. As we
were working, a couple of bridesmaids who were there for a wedding came into
our meeting room, nearly in tears. The
one bridesmaid had come in from out of town and was just trying on her dress
for the first time, and could not get it closed in the back. It wasn’t even close! Thank goodness the dress also had a silk
shawl, so Iris got busy and sewed that dress around the girl with heavy thread,
and then sewed the shawl to the dress, so it looked just perfect. She single-handedly saved the day – and the
wedding. And of course, we all laughed
through it, even the flustered bridesmaid!
