She Wore a Grayish Pantsuit

I was sitting here minding my own bee’s wax—that’s just a figure of speech, by the way—when a co-worker, an Asian woman in her late 20s who I’ve barely spoken to, wandered by, threw on the brakes, picked up the CD comp of Ford scores on my desk, and said the following words, which I did not expect to hear coming out of her mouth: “Oh! John Wayne! I love John Wayne!” That kicked off a 10-minute blabbermouth session—she knows all of the Ford/Wayne movies cold—which ended with her skipping away yelling “Now I want to go home and watch The Searchers!”

As James Bond once said, I must be dreaming…