Velvet Verbosity

“No man loves life like him that’s growing old.” ~Sophocles

He is an elegant man, tall, slender, and white like a beech tree bending gracefully over his task.  I ask him where I can find the vinegar but he doesn’t hear me.  It is then I see he is wearing a hearing aid.  I speak more loudly, move in closer but not too close.  I don’t want to give him a start.  I want him to remain graceful like he is.  He hears me at last, turns slowly toward me, blinks a couple of times and then efficiently tells me, “aisle eight”.  He is turned back to his work before I can even say thank you.

It is Saturday and the store seems full of old men today.  Or maybe it’s that I’m noticing them today.  Perhaps some yearning to understand where it is I’m headed, to find a message in the lines on their faces that yes, there is meaning, and they’ve found it.

On my way out to the car, a largish man leans his stomach over the handle of the cart, leaning on it for support more than pushing it.  The cart is full of cheap bottles of soda and I imagine him sitting down to a dinner of microwaved meatloaf and a glass of iced pop in front of the television.  Later he will fall asleep in his chair with a blue light flickering across his face and his stained t-shirt.

Driving home there is a light drizzle.  Not enough for the delayed wiper setting, but enough that I have to manually send them swiping every few minutes.  It is near dusk.  I drive past a robust old man with an unruly white and gray beard that billows like a storm cloud around his face.  He is walking in this gray drizzle and yet seems not to notice.  He strides along, piercing the drizzle with his dark-eyed squint, carrying his round belly and that mass of hair like he means it.

Two brothers resisting age, fighting it with all their might.  The regimen of vitamins, maniacal exercise and pretending they’re still in the game long past their prime.  Resisting settling in or down they achieve little but looking restless and never quite satisfied with the Now.