"You are too rigid in thinking," his granny used to tell him. "You need a flexible head."
As a kid, he had always wondered what that would look like. He wondered if his grandmother had a range of heads in a cupboard somewhere that she could exchange when she needed to think in a different way: unscrewing one and then fixing another in place. Once, when his friend Gilbert came to stay, he spent the whole weekend searching the house, while his grandmother worked outside in the fields, cultivating vegetables that she liked to put on his plate and make him try.
"I don't like turnips!" he would protest.
"You are to rigid," she'd reply. "You need a flexible head!"
They didn't find any heads, although they did find a cupboard filled with jars of various types of pickled vegetables.
"Your grandmother must like pickles," Gilbert said.
"I don't think so," Brad replied. "I never see her eating them - she just collects them I think."
"You never know when you might need them," Granny said later. "When the soldiers come, and the stores close - you'll be glad of these jars."
...
