Minding Frankie Read Online Free

question of my being the old style. The old guard. I would take children to visit galleries and exhibits. They would have a sheet of paper with twenty questions on it and they would spend a morning there trying to find answers. I thought that it gave them a great grounding in how to look at a picture or a sculpture. Well, I thought so, anyway. Then came this new principal, achild himself, with the notion that teaching art was all about free expression. He really wanted a recent graduate who knew how to do this. I didn’t, so I had to go.”
    “They can’t sack you for being mature, surely?” Charles was sympathetic. His own case was different. He was the public face of the hotel, they had told him, and these times meant the hotel’s face must be a young face. That was logical in a cruel sort of way. But this Emily wasn’t old. She wasn’t fifty yet. They must have laws against that kind of discrimination.
    “No, they didn’t actually say I was dismissed. They just kept me in the background doing filing, away from the children, out of the art studio. It was unbearable, so I left. But they had forced me to go.”
    “Were you upset?”
    “Oh, yes, at the start. I was very upset indeed. It kind of made nothing of all the work I had done for years. I had gotten accustomed to meeting people at art galleries who often said, ‘Miss Lynch, you started off my whole interest in art,’ and so I thought it was all written off when they let me go. Like saying I had contributed nothing.”
    Charles felt tears in his eyes. She was describing exactly his own years as porter in the hotel. Written off. That’s what he felt.
    But Emily had cheered up. She put twirly bits of pastry on top of the pie and cleared the kitchen table swiftly. “But my friend Betsy told me that I was crazy to sit sulking in my corner. I should resign at once and set about doing what I had really wanted to do. Begin the rest of my life, she called it.”
    “And did you?” Charles asked. Wasn’t America a wonderful place!
He
wouldn’t be able to do that here—not in a million years.
    “Yes, I did. I sat down and made a list of what I wanted to do. Betsy was right. If I had gotten a post in some other school maybe the same thing would have happened. I had a small savings account, so I could afford to be without paid work for a while. Trouble was I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, so I did several things.
    “First I took a cooking course. Tra-la-la. That’s why I can make achicken pie so quickly. And then I went to an intensive course and learned to use computers and the Internet properly so I could get a job in any office if I wanted to. Then I went to this garden center where they had window-box and planter classes. So now that I am full of skills I decided to go and see the world.”
    “And Betsy? Did she do that too?”
    “No. She already understood the Internet and she doesn’t want to cook because she’s always on a diet, but she did share the window-box addiction with me.”
    “And suppose they asked you back to your old job. Would you go?”
    “No. I can’t now, even if they
did
ask. No, these days I’m much too busy,” Emily said.
    “I see.” Charles nodded. He seemed about to say something else but stopped himself. He fussed about getting more milk for the tea.
    Emily knew he wanted to say something; she knew how to listen. He would say it eventually.
    “The thing is,” he said slowly and with great pain, “the real thing is that these new brooms which are meant to be sweeping clean, they sweep away a lot of what was valuable and important as well as sweeping out cobwebs or whatever.…”
    Emily saw it then. This would have to be handled carefully. She looked at him sympathetically. “Have another mug of tea, Uncle Charles.”
    “No, I have to get back,” he said.
    “Do you? I mean think about it for a moment, Uncle Charles. Do you have to? What more can they do to you? I mean that they haven’t done