I have a thing for old people. I love them. Old ladies. Old men. I love their stories, the way their eyes tend to glaze when they tell them. I love how slowly they approach the world, how thoughtfully. I love the way their houses smell.
I think I've just been blessed with an abundance of really cool old people. I grew up on a small one way street where the houses were no more than three feet apart. You could almost reach out one of the alley facing windows and pass that cup of sugar to your neighbor. Really.
Playing hide & seek and tag in that neighborhood was a very intimate experience. Everyone's yard was free game and if they set it "off limits", they were bound to get a banana up their tailpipe or some playdough poop in their mailbox. Revenge was intense. None of the fences were taller than four feet and most of them were chain link, which made for easy hopping. The street was small enough that the only cars coming and going were usually those that belonged to it's residents.
It was a pretty balanced blend of old couples and young families but across the street lived an old man we called Pal. He was round, had a shaved head, a wood workshop in his basement and cherry tomatoes and parsely growing in his backyard. He let us play tv tag in that yard if the street lights went on and we weren't ready to go back inside yet.
But I was his favorite. I spent most of my childhood on his front porch. I'd come outside, he'd whistle and I'd cross the street to assume my place in the green canvas backed chair beside him. He worked the railroad before he retired so he'd sing some of those old songs, repeat the same old jokes but mostly he'd just listen to me talk about growing up. And he gave no bullshit advice, which, to a kid, is a real commodity.
I had a great uncle and a great aunt, who, strangely enough, were brother and sister (respectively) to my grandfather and grandmother (who died too young for me to remember).
They were lovers of words and jingles and my uncle was a naturalist (which I didn't really have the word for until I grew up). All I knew is that he loved telling me about the things that grew up alongside their woods in the yard at their lakehouse. He knew the birds' calls and the night sky. He wrote poems and could bitch the government up one side and down the other. He liked to pinch womens' asses. He refused to be old. The only photo I have of him when he was young is an image of three men standing outside a teepee. He's the tall, lean one in the center with gators on and a heart cut and sewed onto his t-shirt. I think he was the kind of guy who might have stolen my heart. And he did, but it would be years to come.
Our closest neighbor is an old man. His name is Ellis and he grew up in the valley we live in. He's an old widower, stacks his own wood, sugars every spring and has a wooden leg. Well, it's probably not wooden anymore, but it used to be, and Ella likes to say it's still so. He, like Pal, sits on his front porch when the weather allows. He, like my uncle Wilfred, keeps bird feeders and binoculars and knows the comings and goings of the creatures around his place. He likes it when Ella comes and sits on his porch and tells him how it is to be a kid these days. He'll tell her about the days they used to log with draft horses and how sometimes they'd run into bear or mountain lions on the ridge behind our farm. It was on that ridge where he lost his leg in a hunting accident. He was nineteen years old. Hasn't hunted since. He lets her know when we're going to get a storm because his missing leg tells him. And he's always right.
I love the fact that she's got his company. And that she'll know the sweetness that old people can provide. When they go, their stories go with them. If I had more time, I'd spend my days archiving old people's stories.
