A Kremp's Gift for our Guest Speaker

Drove down to Kremp's Florist to buy a gift for tonite's guest speaker plus our last guest speaker who I forgot to gift.

You know me, looking for something real pretty at the cheapest price. Elizabeth was on duty behind the counter while I walked around searching for the perfect gifts.

Hi Ruth, said Drew Kremp who I'd been wishing would appear.

Drew, I said, dyou have any reasonably priced gifts for our guest speaker?

I'll see what I can do, he said, walking behind the fish pond where the gold fish heard me and were surfacing in hopes I'd feed them. What? My kidney-healthy foods? The green parrot could be heard cawing off in the distance. I didn't feel like going back to talk to him, though I often do. I have a couple of his feathers hanging on my living room wall. I'm a feather-finder but not in the winter.

Drew came back with a b'ful kolanchee, a succulent with thick leaves and tiny orange flowers, or yellow. He brought me two.

He wrapped em in foil and let Elizabeth ring em up. I pulled out my credit card and explained the situation to her.

My real credit card, I told her, is being mailed to me by my dentist where I left it yesterday. This is my old credit card which has the same numbers except I've written the exp. date on the front and the secret code on the front.

I'm very clever, Reader, and stuck the sticky white part from US postal stamps onto the front and printed out the necessary numerals.

She gave it back and I quickly tucked it in my wallet so they wouldn't have to mail it back like the dentist did.

Drew himself was putting out some new plants. I told him a story about my buying cyclamen and primrose at the Produce Junction in Hatboro. They died within a week, I said.

He patiently explained what goes on. The truckers in, say, Florida have these sick plants that will never make it and they sell them by the truckload to different buyers and then ship them out in quantity. These sickly plants are then sold off in retail stores like the Junction.

In fact, I just put my dead cyclamen in the compost heap.

I told Drew I bought my first orchid for only $9. It was beautiful, I said, but it began dying the very day I put it on my windowsill. Each day a yellow petal drooped and then fell off. Six petals, dead and dropped in six days flat.

But, I said, there's a happy ending to the story. I was working on a novel. In fact, the edited manuscript just came back the other day, and my teacher liked the part where I wrote: his cancer was killing him like the petals on a flower, each one dropping off one by one.