She had been there before the dinosaurs, yet the asteroid had somehow evaded her. She, along with the cockroaches, had thrived. Through Kennedy’s assassination, the walk on the moon, and through the rise of Britney Spears, she had been at the radio station. For many of those lost years she had been able to chain smoke in her office. That had finally been banned just 15 years ago; about the same time Post-It notes came into fashion. They now covered every inch of her office--on her computer, on her desk, on the walls, held up by push pins on her bulletin board, and even hanging from the shelves of her shelves.
Maybe it was the the Post-It notes that reminded her of everything that had ever happened since the dawn of man, or before. She knew every date and every time, and where she had been and what she had had for lunch and what her husband had had for lunch and what they did after lunch, and that it had all happened on Thursday, February 22nd, 1908.
Each recollection would start with the phrase “I'll tell you something.” And then we would be told something, something interesting in the end, but in a roundabout way, very roundabout, with details about colors of cars and temperatures and turkeys cooked by dead fathers. Finally we would find out that on a Tuesday in 1980 she had been at the Thrifty Store buying a scarf for her sister’s wedding when it had been robbed and the clerk had died from a bullet wound to the eye. I'll tell you something!
She had no plans to leave, although retirement should have come more than 10 years ago. She had quit smoking with help from the patch. She had put the patch on Wednesday, February 1987 and she was smoke free by March that same year--it was a Friday. She hadn’t smoked since and she rarely ate. She arrived before everyone else and left at 5pm on the dot. She didn’t take lunch but would occasionally eat an apple, along with the bottle of Yoo-hoo she brought each day and placed on the second shelf of the station refrigerator.
