Live, laugh, love

On our usual holiday sort of weekend outing to Costco this morning, we stopped by to see some friends' house and yard that we hadn't visited yet. The friends were away (as we knew), so we couldn't visit them, but everything was so inviting, it was as though they were there all the time.

House from the street side of our friends' picket fence
(all of the photos have been filtered artistically in Photoshop;
click to enlarge)

We guessed the cat was a member of our friends' household
(he or she seemed at home)

Don't fail to click on this one so you can read the words

I was just being myself at Costco, but maybe moreso because of the words.
    First stop was the optical shop, to get a new hard case for my glasses. The old case's lid no longer held to, and my glasses had slipped out onto the garage floor Friday evening (though I didn't notice it at the time and found them finally, after looking in all the usually suspected places, two or three times each, only as I was headed to my car to drive to the gym to look around the next-suspected place I might have left them).
    The optician looked out of sorts to me. "Why so glum, David? Having a bad day already?"
    He just shrugged. "So, what do you need?" he said, seeming not to want to dwell on whatever might be bothering him.
    I told him and he rummaged around in a drawer for a new hard case, finding three candidates. I selected the Van Heusen (Van Heusen? I thought they made dress shirts!) and turned in my Geoffrey Beene. He noticed that my glasses were a little crooked and offered to adjust them for me.
    I said, "I've tried to be very careful to always use both hands to take them off, but most of the time I'm unconscious." I told him what had happened in the garage and about looking all over for the glasses, about how my wife had said I'd probably just taken them off and put them down someplace, as usual not being aware of where.
    I laughed and told him what had happened almost first thing this morning. "Before my wife and Siegfried left for their walk, she told me they were going out by way of the garage and would I not lock the door into the house? I told her I wouldn't. But when I went out to the garage for something, I automatically locked the door when I came back in. Unconscious, you see."
    "That happens more and more," David said, "as we age."
    I thanked him and told him I hoped his day improved.
    "It already has," he said.

Since I had my camera, I'd brought it into Costco so I could take some pictures of their cut flowers. I took a few but there was barely enough light and the photos weren't nearly as beautiful as the flowers seemed to be (unlike photographs of living flowers, where the opposite often seems to be the case).
    As I was checking out (my wife had already gone back to the car), I hoped I'd see Jannine at customer service, which is by the exit.
    And there she was. I told her why I had my camera.
    "There's one more flower I'd like to take a picture of, Jannine, if I may?"
    She took my hand, which I'd laid on the counter. "Oh, I don't take good pictures," she said, looking even more fetching in her possibly false modesty.
    "I understand that you might not want your picture taken," I said. "Let me show you these." She was still holding my hand, so I operated the camera with my other one.
    "Oh, that's some friends' house," I said and explained what we'd done on the way to Costco. "Their cat...some shoes...Oh, and let me zoom in on that bench so you can read the words."
    "Live, laugh, love," she said.
    I squeezed her hand and said that I wasn't going to take her picture, I could see that she really didn't want me to, even if she were my favorite of Costco's flowers.
    "You've made my day," she said.