Does Aging Make People Ornery?

Everyone has fears. I have a fear of the water (which is subsiding each day I live on the water). I also have a fear of looking like this lady. I remember as a child, I was told not to scowl because if someone hit me in the back of the head, my face would stick like that forever. It seems like many older women must have been beamed upside the head because so many of them wear the scowl. When I see these people, I have to smile. Just to ensure my face never sticks like that.

Lola and I returned to the dock this morning, after our walk. An older couple was pulling up in their dinghy, the woman all a-scowl, as you can imagine. At the top of the dock, Justin's scooter secured a parking spot (for my car... I let him borrow it last night and it looks like he saved himself a spot with the scooter, but ended up taking the bus home instead.)

Anyone who lives around here knows how we covet parking spots. Apparently this older couple must have spied the spot from their boat and thought it was empty. They came ashore to empty some trash and move their car to the "empty" spot, only to find out the spot wasn't empty at all. When the scowler realized there was a scooter already in the spot, she relayed the information to her husband in a snippy voice. Then she turned to me and demanded, "Is that YOUR scooter?" "No," I replied, all the while thinking, What difference does it make whose scooter it is? Or, Is that scooter not entitled to park in a spot? And, If it were MY scooter, were YOU going to tell ME to move it? Especially after YOU addressed ME in that tone? Sometimes I chuckle at the way people communicate. Everyone knows I love old sayings and quotes. So here's one for the old scowler:

"You catch more flies with honey."

Anywho, I proceeded to my dinghy which was loosely looped around the post at the end of the dock- the very same post Mr. Scowler was in the process of tightly tying his own dinghy to. I told him I just needed to release my line before he went to work hitching and double hitching and triple hitching his line on top of mine. His response: "It's okay. We're only going to be here a couple minutes." Good for you, sir. "I'm leaving right now," I retorted as I undid his line, hopped into my dinghy and coasted out of there. For the record, a *couple minutes* in Scowlerville is much longer than the *one-hundred and twenty seconds* it equates to in my world.