127) Back at Home
Our flight home went smoothly, with none of the drama of our flight to Australia and it was good to be home again even though we missed our Australian family a great deal. It was good to see Dominic and our dog Muffin again but it was hard to settle back into a routine.
Jonny went back to putting the finishing touched to the ball throwing machine and I started looking for another job. The first thing I managed to get was for only one day a week. It was working for a hearing aid specialist in Kloof. I was employed to answer the phone, make appointments and generally, just be in the office on the day that the specialist was consulting in his other office in Piertermaritzburg. It was hardly strenuous and staying awake was the hardest part. I did do a couple of extra days to stand in for the regular receptionist when she was off sick and only then did I meet my boss. We talked about the fact that there was so little for me to do and he asked me if I would be prepared to do some computer data capture work while I was there. I agreed and that was good. I was not used to working on a computer but once he showed me what he wanted me to do it was easy work and I enjoyed it. After a while I got a phone call from a woman I knew from when I was working with Ballards, she was one of the reps who had called there. She told me that a friend of hers who owned an antique shop in Hillcrest was looking for someone to help him and she wanted to know if I was interested. As it was for five days a week it was more of a proposition for me, so I went along to see the gentleman and he gave me the job. His name was Will Adams and his shop was in a rather new shopping complex in Hillcrest called ‘The Heritage Market’. It was a very pretty complex, and the idea was that it had mostly art and craft shops. There were gift shops and tourist types of businesses, cafes and restaurants but no big supermarket or that kind of trade. It was a good idea but at the time it was not really doing very well and we were not very busy. The shop was open seven days a week but it I arranged with Will that he or another woman assistant would work over the weekends and on Tuesday afternoons as I wanted to continue to attend the Bible study group that was held on Tuesday afternoons that I had been attending for about seven years by then.
As the shop sold mostly silver and copper items we also carried a very good brand of metal polish. My job was to demonstrate the polish and sell it and also the items that filled the little shop to overflowing. There was a large stock and so it was hard to keep the place clean and tidy but I did try to make it as nice as possible. Will Adams was a divorced man with a young daughter. He was not terribly keen on the shop side of his business; he much preferred to be out and about looking for more stock. At the time Will had an ex-wife, a current girl friend and various ex-girlfriends so there was always some drama in his life.
The shop next to Will’s Antiques was a shoe shop owned by a young couple, Susan and Yoel Solomon. Yoel was Jewish but Susan was South African. They had a little boy called Daniel. The next shop was an art framing shop. The young girl who worked there was called Megan. I had met her when I worked for Ballards and she was working in a local hamburger shop. I thought that she was about 15 but it turned out that she was 23 and married to a young man called Eugene. I was much older than all of them, they were all younger than my youngest son Dominic, but we all got on well together, helped each other and looked out for each other. It was Megan who started calling me the Wizen One. She had been doing the crossword and did not know the meaning of one of the clues, so she came and asked me. It was something I happened to know and so she was impressed and thought I was very wise. After a couple of weeks she and Susan came into the shop together and asked me to settle an argument. They had been arguing about the meaning of Wizen. Susan had told Megan that it was not very polite of her to call me wizen. I told them that it meant ‘old, dried up and wrinkled’. Poor Megan was so embarrassed. I knew that she had thought it had meant ‘wise’ so had let it pass. She would not believe Susan when she had told her the real meaning. But it was too late, by then I had become the ‘Wizen One’ and it had stuck.
When I had worked there for about eight months Will decided to take a trip to England. He had family there and he thought that maybe he could start an import/export business with his antiques and sell them in England at the many markets he said were there. He planned to be away for about three months and went off leaving me completely in charge. Before he went he had filled every square inch of the shop with stock and he had more in his house if I needed it. As it turned out his plans did not work out the way he had hoped and he was back in South Africa in about six weeks and he had shelved the import/export idea. I never knew why.
While he was away Will must have had a good long think about his business situation and decided that he did not want to renew the lease on the shop that was due to expire in another two months. So when he came back we had a big closing down sale and tried to clear as much of the stock as possible. We were very busy for a while counting and cataloguing all the stock and selling as much of it as we could before the shop had to be vacated. At the end of the month we moved the remaining stock into Will’s house and once again I was out of work.
Jonny went back to putting the finishing touched to the ball throwing machine and I started looking for another job. The first thing I managed to get was for only one day a week. It was working for a hearing aid specialist in Kloof. I was employed to answer the phone, make appointments and generally, just be in the office on the day that the specialist was consulting in his other office in Piertermaritzburg. It was hardly strenuous and staying awake was the hardest part. I did do a couple of extra days to stand in for the regular receptionist when she was off sick and only then did I meet my boss. We talked about the fact that there was so little for me to do and he asked me if I would be prepared to do some computer data capture work while I was there. I agreed and that was good. I was not used to working on a computer but once he showed me what he wanted me to do it was easy work and I enjoyed it. After a while I got a phone call from a woman I knew from when I was working with Ballards, she was one of the reps who had called there. She told me that a friend of hers who owned an antique shop in Hillcrest was looking for someone to help him and she wanted to know if I was interested. As it was for five days a week it was more of a proposition for me, so I went along to see the gentleman and he gave me the job. His name was Will Adams and his shop was in a rather new shopping complex in Hillcrest called ‘The Heritage Market’. It was a very pretty complex, and the idea was that it had mostly art and craft shops. There were gift shops and tourist types of businesses, cafes and restaurants but no big supermarket or that kind of trade. It was a good idea but at the time it was not really doing very well and we were not very busy. The shop was open seven days a week but it I arranged with Will that he or another woman assistant would work over the weekends and on Tuesday afternoons as I wanted to continue to attend the Bible study group that was held on Tuesday afternoons that I had been attending for about seven years by then.
As the shop sold mostly silver and copper items we also carried a very good brand of metal polish. My job was to demonstrate the polish and sell it and also the items that filled the little shop to overflowing. There was a large stock and so it was hard to keep the place clean and tidy but I did try to make it as nice as possible. Will Adams was a divorced man with a young daughter. He was not terribly keen on the shop side of his business; he much preferred to be out and about looking for more stock. At the time Will had an ex-wife, a current girl friend and various ex-girlfriends so there was always some drama in his life.
The shop next to Will’s Antiques was a shoe shop owned by a young couple, Susan and Yoel Solomon. Yoel was Jewish but Susan was South African. They had a little boy called Daniel. The next shop was an art framing shop. The young girl who worked there was called Megan. I had met her when I worked for Ballards and she was working in a local hamburger shop. I thought that she was about 15 but it turned out that she was 23 and married to a young man called Eugene. I was much older than all of them, they were all younger than my youngest son Dominic, but we all got on well together, helped each other and looked out for each other. It was Megan who started calling me the Wizen One. She had been doing the crossword and did not know the meaning of one of the clues, so she came and asked me. It was something I happened to know and so she was impressed and thought I was very wise. After a couple of weeks she and Susan came into the shop together and asked me to settle an argument. They had been arguing about the meaning of Wizen. Susan had told Megan that it was not very polite of her to call me wizen. I told them that it meant ‘old, dried up and wrinkled’. Poor Megan was so embarrassed. I knew that she had thought it had meant ‘wise’ so had let it pass. She would not believe Susan when she had told her the real meaning. But it was too late, by then I had become the ‘Wizen One’ and it had stuck.
When I had worked there for about eight months Will decided to take a trip to England. He had family there and he thought that maybe he could start an import/export business with his antiques and sell them in England at the many markets he said were there. He planned to be away for about three months and went off leaving me completely in charge. Before he went he had filled every square inch of the shop with stock and he had more in his house if I needed it. As it turned out his plans did not work out the way he had hoped and he was back in South Africa in about six weeks and he had shelved the import/export idea. I never knew why.
While he was away Will must have had a good long think about his business situation and decided that he did not want to renew the lease on the shop that was due to expire in another two months. So when he came back we had a big closing down sale and tried to clear as much of the stock as possible. We were very busy for a while counting and cataloguing all the stock and selling as much of it as we could before the shop had to be vacated. At the end of the month we moved the remaining stock into Will’s house and once again I was out of work.
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