Evelyne is 91 years old, with a caustic sense of humor and the art of definitive sentences, full of wisdom, capable of inspiring the younger generation. Like “it’s better to sweat than to tremble” when she refuses to take off her gray coat or “quickly and well, two things that don’t go together”. The elegant and mischievous nonagenarian lives alone in her apartment in the Empalot district of Toulouse. “Until I was 85, I went dancing on Saturdays at the Roseraie with a friend,” she confides. But now I don’t do anything anymore. In my head, I am young, but not so in my movements. » Nothing, that’s quickly said. She teaches knitting, or at least tries, to the housekeepers who pass by her house. And she receives regular visits from Germinal, HER volunteer from Little brothers of the poorwhose mission is to be his “loneliness hunter”.
The pair are well established. She pretends to be authoritarian, he pretends to like being reprimanded. But Germinal has more than one trick up its sleeve. On Tuesday, he managed to bring his protégé back into a classroom. That of the Jules-Julien school where ten “angels” from CM2 were waiting for three duos in total. Martine and Evy, an ex-dancer with a thousand lives from Jacksonville, Florida, and Blanche flanked by Maryse, a shy septuagenarian who loves chess and Rummikub.
“These little ones are cute”
The pretext for this “Cool coffee”: making decorative candles together. In glass yogurt pots, with the multitude of adhesive tapes and beads that Audrey Motz, the host of the Clae*, and his accomplice Gisèle, and resell them at the school’s Christmas market on December 21, to be able to pay a nest egg to the association. The real reason for this one-hour meeting, “the interest of the matter” as Blanche says: to offer some a moment of warmth as the holidays approach, and others “a moment of intergenerational sharing”.
“The affair” therefore does not take five minutes to purr in a good mood. Everyone easily finds their place around the table. Little Swann begins to mechanically pick up everything that Evy drops, whom the children already met the previous year. Martin, with cosmopolitan designs, comes to ask him how we wish “Happy Holidays” in English for his messages on the tealight holders. “I love children and animals, and I love to joke,” says the American enthusiastically, who makes the candles twice as fast as everyone else, stuffs them with twice as many pearls, and adorns them with three times more glitter. The frail Martine, whose eyesight leaves something to be desired, specializes in artistic comments. “This one is very original,” she said, watching Arthur intertwine his ribbons. “They are very nice, very kind, very welcoming, these little ones,” she notes. For me, it’s a moment of sunshine! »
Time Machine
At the other end of this creative square, for little Jade, it’s more like boarding the time machine. Her neighbor Evelyne, who has strangely magnetized half of the group’s pairs of scissors, threads beads while the creative Germinal does all the work. As she can no longer see very well either, she prefers to immerse herself in her memories. She tells an astonished Jade that her son – 73 years old today – was also a student at the Jules-Julien school. Except, and it’s hard to believe when looking out the window, that there was a farm right next door where she came to “get milk”. “I think it’s the gas station now,” she repeats to the other children who have gathered there, attracted by the neighborhood’s past.
Thirty-four candles later, it’s canteen time for the children. The troop, who will have other opportunities to reunite, separates without forgetting to sing a thunderous “Happy Birthday” to Evy, who blows 79 this week. On the way out, Blanche had jokingly suggested to Evelyne to slide back down the ramp. With her crutch with a purple handle, customized and glittered in the meantime by a little joker, she chooses to walk away with small steps on the arm of her faithful Germinal.
* Recreation center associated with the school