“That’s how I know,” she said.
Pooh Lewis used to be my service project in middle school. We had to pick a volunteer opportunity and then write a paper about what we learned. I learned old people lie just as much as everybody else but for better reasons. Pooh had only pretended to be blind so someone would sign up to come read to her, and when someone （me） did, she had no desire to be read to. She wasn’t really blind, so could read to herself. She just wanted the company.
“Don’t you want to hang out with people your own age?” I asked when I showed up the first day and clued in to the fact that she didn’t need me when I found her in her kitchen reading Baseball America.
“God no,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Old people are boring. And they smell weird. And around here, most of them are gone anyway.”
“You think I’m interesting?” That seemed to be the implication, but no one had ever thought so before.
“I don’t know yet.” She’d looked me over carefully, like when you’re trying to buy apples and half of them are bruised. “I’ll keep you posted.”
It’s been four years, so I guess she decided I was interesting enough. Every few months Monday demands to know why I keep going to read to Pooh since the program is over and I already graduated from middle school, and I reply that I was never reading to Pooh.
This is the kind of logic required to unstick Monday from whatever she’s stuck on.
“I also do not like that ‘Pooh’ sounds like ‘poo,’” she sometimes says.
“It’s short for ‘Winifred,’” I explained the first time.
“I do not like when things are short for things,” said Monday. As if I didn’t know. “And neither ‘Poo’ nor ‘Pooh’ is short for ‘Winifred.’”
“Her name is Winifred so people called her Winnie and then they called her Winnie-the-Pooh and then they called her Pooh.”
“‘Pooh’ can be short for ‘Winnie-the-Pooh,’ and ‘Winnie’ can be short for ‘Winifred,’ but you cannot combine them, and you cannot read to a blind person for your middle school service project if she is not blind and you are not in middle school.”
“That’s true,” I always eventually agree, both because it is and because it’s faster.
Pooh was four when she came to the United States from Korea with her parents. They changed their last name from Lee to Lewis to sound more American. Then they tried to pick the most patriotic name they could think of for their little girl and came up with Winifred.
“How is Winifred a patriotic name?” I asked the first time she told me this story.
“How should I know?” said Pooh. “You think you’re the only one whose mother is crazy?”
Yesterday, she argued, “You should skip history and enjoy yourself. Sixteen was one of the best years of my life.”
“Nineteen-sixteen?” I asked.
She swatted at me. “Do I look like I’m a hundred and two?” She does, kind of. “The year I was sixteen. At your very high school. Trust me. I’ve already been all the ages. Sixteen is one of the good ones.”
I made a face. “Small towns were more fun back then.”
“What makes you think so?”
“It was all hoedowns and hayrides.”
“Neither one.” Pooh shook her head. “Not even once.”
“And the neighbors all pitched in to build a barn or whatever.”
“It wasn’t Witness.”
“The world was small back then”—I couldn’t quite find the words to mean what I meant, but I’m pretty sure she got it anyway. She almost always does—“so it didn’t matter if your town was too.”
“We did know the earth was round even when I was a child.”
“Now the world is big.” I spread my arms to show her. “Huge. You can’t spend your life in a tiny nowhere town like Bourne.”
“The world is smaller than it ever was,” Pooh said. “And no matter what town they’re in, sixteen-year-olds want to leave it. Nowhere in the world is big enough to satisfy a teenager.”
“But it’s different here from other places.”
“What other places?”
“All the other places.” I waved at them. “Out there where high school is the best time of your life. It’s exciting. It’s dangerous—”
“If you’re looking for dangerous…” Pooh began, and I saw her point, but it wasn’t the one I was making.