brave new world that has such people in it!

An assortment of customers in the Little Shop of Harmony:

Jukka. My least favourite customer. Probably because he rarely pays for the clothes he picks up in the second-hand basement and seems to think he makes up for it by leaving an extremely smelly piece of his own clothing somewhere instead. He is arrogant, ungrateful and shouts at me when I refuse to give him things for free (forgetting that I gave him something out of pity only the day before). But he does have some entertainment value. He sometimes wears an orange wig and pretends he is John Lennon. He picks up Christian tracts and hands them out to people in the street. He carries around an old guitar which he never plays. Sometimes he asks me to kiss him (which I also refuse). And sometimes he shocks some of the staid, too-dignified customers that definitely need to be shocked out of their own world every now and then.

The war veteran. Almost 90 years old and he pedals for miles on a tricycle every day, usually in camouflage-patterned clothes (I wouldn't have thought that would be a veteran's first choice in fashion but maybe he can't afford to buy something else). Nearly deaf but fluent in two languages, always polite and ready for a chat with anyone. "Time to go home and count the kids", he jokes and it cuts me a bit to the heart because I witnessed the pain in him a couple of years ago when his beloved wife passed away after a long illness and I know his only child only rarely visits him. He has trouble with his heart and every time he leaves I wonder if this is the last time I see him, and I already know I will miss him.

Eeva L. A proper lady. Comes by every day, sometimes twice, and usually buys something from the basement - a silk blouse, a nice scarf, something expensive-looking. Always wears a skirt and heels, in winter a fur coat, plenty of make-up to hide the fact that she is over 60. In a town where elderly ladies usually are of the mousey kind, she stands out. She runs some kind of cosmetics business from her home and sometimes mentions needing all these nice clothes for business meetings, but my colleague warned me not to take everything she says at face value. She is quiet and has a beautiful, warm smile.

Old man Kanervikko. Smells of moth balls and his clothes look a hundred years old. Whenever he comes in through the door, I sigh because I know I will be listening to his chatter for at least twenty minutes unless I make an excuse to go off and do something else. But he needs someone to listen to him, so usually I stay for a while. He comes to buy some book recommended on the Christian TV channel (which he watches devoutly even though he is not a church-goer) and enthusiastically tells me about that book or some other he has read recently (i.e. within the last thirty years). However, chatting to him is usually rewarding, as sooner or later he will say or do something unintentionally funny. One day, he told me he had snuck out to buy a book while he was supposed to be baby-sitting his grandson - after making a deal with the boy not to tell his parents. "But I met the parents as I was leaving", he adds with a guilty giggle. Today, he took off his hundred-year-old hat, and small pieces of what looked like toilet paper fell out and snowed all over the floor. He picked them all up without a break in his chattering, stuffed them back in the hat and put it back on.