Being Old

Being Old...

                                  to a faraway girl and a beautiful photo.

A brief Preamble after a few days...

(My Evil F. Bunny read these words and thought they were severely depressing. I am sorry. I did not mean them that way. I am not dead. I still have the urge to dance, the spirit to look up into infinity. I still have dreams. I am more alive than most, I am slower than others. I love my life, but sometimes pine that it waited so long to finally arrive.)

 

Sometimes when you are old, you see a picture of a pretty girl, OK, maybe a beautiful woman and it is so nice that it saddens you. Not because they are beautiful, or that you are alone. But, it might sadden you because that part of your life is done and has passed. And even if it wasn’t, you are happy with who you are sharing life with the now.
 

And that life of the young and run and vigor is gone. It left the station. The tracks are empty and another train will not stop for a long, long time. It will be a long while before the next journey begins.

But still there is a beautiful woman. It is not her fault. It was posted because she was beautiful, or she was full of life and youth and time. She was full of time. And those around her were full of time. 

It was not posted to sadden old men. That is selfish of an old man. Maybe some old man, may never look, or close their eyes, head rolled back on a cool shaded park bench or dreams behind closed eyes and they will just sit for a movement to see it they are still alive.

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I told a friend to stop sending me Porn, porn pictures of the largest this and that, the wettest whatever, of beach scenes and park scenes and just poses that would probably never happen to an old man. 

 

At least to a somewhat poor old man.

I know, I know, it’s degrading, it’s bad, it’s wrong.  It isn’t something I even go out of my way to watch and drool over. I even get a little nervous when two kiss too long on TV.

But the reason I told him to stop is that it saddens me in another way. In a way that says: That part of your life has passed where some beautiful young women will get all licky and bendy and climby all over you like she was hungry and you were a giant cheeseburger with everything.  Those days have passed. Maybe that train has left that station.

They were fun at 19 and 24 and even 29, but they sadden me now.

When some old men are, well, old, they know it is wrong to be racist or hard-one-sided or eat wrong or just do something that every bone in their body says "this is wrong~! It is just wrong. But screw it. I am doing it (what ever it is!).

But they do it anyway.  Because they are old. They may speak to the young about what to eat or why not to hate or why you should tie your shoelaces, but they are old and they don't have too follow their example if they don't want too. 

And they live their lives in the mold they have grown into. Into the stone statue, they have or life has carved of them.

Maybe it is fear. Maybe it is just the weakness of age, too weak to defend themselves from those that would disagree. So they totter off and mumble and only in silent rooms or around faces they know well, will they every raise their voice, redden their cheeks, spittle sometimes gathering at the corners of an old mouth and rattle “I hate this!” or “Why are we doing this?” even  ”Just let me be”, and in silence think “and I will swim around in my pool of muddled confusion until I am gone, until I forget what sparked my anger, until I see my aging squirrel that will move these thoughts along that upset me..."

Because maybe, hopefully, I am on the cusp, I don’t think old men are inherently bad, but some things may just be too carved into their spirit to change. They may remember why Peace was good, or sex was fun and just being a true, giving soul had so many rewards far beyond the dollar but now they are old. And the grooves that shaped the man are cut to deep and it is hard to do anything but blurt out, throw fear aside and just bellow “get off my lawn!” (symbolically or literally.)

Maybe this is why old men should not be politicians and leaders of the young, because it is too hard for them to accept the new, move forward, race forward, run through a forest, run racing, racing towards a goal that is just in the clearing, just past the trees.

They plod.

And sometimes plod is good. Maybe not when a storm is coming, maybe not when the mobs outside the gates are teaming and angry and screaming for a better anything. Maybe that is not the time to plod, to see and feel and express past the deep grooves that time has cut into the spirit and spurt out “I have an idea!” not “Arrrggghhh, stop pounding on my gate!” and then mutter off.

Some mornings, a pretty picture of a pretty woman saddens me and lets me think that maybe they should just be shared with those that still have the time for dreams, because old men have either lived the dream or never lived the dream, but regardless it is almost too late now to begin to dream.

Too bring this back to me, for example, I dreamed this morning that an actor (Robert Patrick for some reason) gave me a mismatched pair of miniature patent leather skating shoes, one mens, one woman’s high gloss mid-calf skating shoe. For some reason, I gave him a TV tray, scratched and with the leg on one side bent, of a farm scene of an old barn, in a deep forest overgrown, in a old barn made of old wood and you could see a  chain saw tossed on the floor rather than hung neatly.

It was not the dream of a woman, or an adventure in the chill air of a mountain whose head was lost in thick clouds, but of some actor I didn’t know and a mismatched pair of shiny ice skating shoes and an old TV tray.

When I woke, I looked at the pretty face of a woman, an eyes that were filled with every emotion, but they were eyes of youth and what seemed to be so much more.

I remembered that I was old and I made my coffee.