Summertime and the living is easy
Fish are biting and the cotton is high
Your daddy's rich,and your mamas good looking
So hush little baby,don't you cry
-Gershwin
There is a man and a woman standing on the corner of Crandall Street and Sumner Avenue in a for the most part new residential area in the northwest corner of Moncton,New Brunswick,then a small city.The man is dressed in blue denim pants and a clean,plain white t-shirt as was his custom at the time. The woman is of average height,and would be said to have had an attractive figure.The two are neighbors who have met on the street and stopped to have a cigarette and a short conversation, the way neighbors sometimes do. There are two children there too.They belong to the man. But it's not yet a society that is obsessed with creating a visual record of itself,so there is nobody there to take a picture of the scene. Still the scene has never really left my mind,it's there and in my mind it looks like a photograph of the day, in colors more muted than today's.
Nothing at all about this scene is unusual.The two people know each other well.The woman looks after the two children on the days that both the man and his wife are working. So the children greet the woman eagerly. For some forgotten reason,they were on a walk through the neighborhood.It's just after lunch on a warm going on hot day, cloudless except for a few contrails.
The man could be said to be in his prime.It's 1966. For some reason he's mentioned to the woman that he is thirty two years old. He's not big,though slightly taller than most.Rather thin,though strong and able.He moves with ease and confidence, works hard whenever called upon to do so, and is a good provider, and proud of that fact. He could protect his family too,were it to come to it.But it's a safe town,and he is a gentleman,not a fighter.He does not frequent the taverns. He walks around town with an understated confidence.At city hall,he is proud to be seen paying his taxes or utilities, or, at the bank,his loans or mortgage. A lot of men were like that then. Though he accepted no nonsense,he was kind to his children,and eagerly showed them off whenever the opportunity arose to do so.Yet he was rather quiet, not at all a braggart.
For some reason,the man said something that day that struck his son as odd."I'm getting old." He told the woman.Perhaps he had discovered a single gray hair, or had an ache in some part of his body that had not been there the day before.Perhaps he was more tired than usual.Or it may have been just a teasing figure of speech.His children thought the remark funny; his acquaintance did not regard it seriously.The children had no real concept of what it meant to get old.
Two years later, the woman was dead.Well before her time. It was only years later that the mans son was able to see,in looking back,that there was never a day in which the man had been more able, competent,sturdy,upright,virile and proud as he was that day in his thirty third year. He began fading some from that day on, though not so quickly, not so that you would notice it from day to day, or even from year to year at that time. It took a good many years, but he diminished some, year after year. He was sick a lot sometimes.He was tired and slept a lot. Then the cigarettes and liquor and all the days commuting eighty miles to work began to chase him like hell hounds,and began to close the gap on him. Strokes became his curse, he aged,then passed, finding,I hope the peace that he never had in this world.
And, I thought,at what point does a man become old?
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