old

me

“And they who grateful memory won
By services to others done”
( ÆN.vi. 664)


Old Man. He is my neighbour, in his early 80s. He is nocturnal. I don’t know his real name and I don’t wish to. I don’t want my fanciful image of him to be destroyed by any name or title. He is, and will forever be, famous in my memory as Old Man. I see Old Man a lot. He carries an overused plastic bag everywhere he goes. Sometimes I see him leaving his house, and a few times I have nosily caught a glimpse of the mountain of plastic bags covering every corner of his little apartment. His body is very fragile; he must weigh around 90 pounds; he permanently has a slight bulge in his back (crooked spine) although he walks and looks in a straightforward fashion. He smiles a lot and reads newspapers and eats at McDonalds sometimes. I hear him moving furniture around at night. –From what I gather, it is the sound of four wooden legs of a table or chair.

I wonder if the world he sees –the one he lives in is as real as the creases in his plastic day bag, or as real as the title which I have idly fixed for him. When I see him in public places –he is usually chatting with strangers. I wonder what he says to them. Perhaps he tells them his life story. I often pretend Old Man had a hard life as a young man (because lives that encountered difficulties often reveal the most interesting truths and make way for stories of the most fascinating nature). One of these stories is when Old Man first moved to Canada from (I believe) somewhere in South Asia or East Europe (there are some similarities between these regions….). Anyway. He was separated from his family due to a bloody war and spent every penny on a one-way plane ticket to Montreal in the 60s when a bunch of HR protests were being staged. He didn’t have enough money to buy a suitcase and instead brought his possessions in plastic bags. I don’t know how he later arrived at this apartment, but that doesn’t matter. The truth is, he is a spy. He sleeps during the day because at night he is too busy transforming his seemingly eclectic apartment into a command center. To do this, he must pull on a few levers (his old armchair, for example). His tabletop turns around and uncovers a highly technical operating system. There are fewer witnesses in the night season. The infrequent excursions to public places are cover-ups: the “strangers” he talks to are other spies. Aside from these fabulously fabricated stories are the brief moments when the Old Man uncovers a smile and somehow connects to this present world better than I do. The former generation knows the present better than the present knows the former as well as itself.

He smiles because he feels bad for me. For the world I have set myself out to fix. He smiles because he is laughing endlessly inside at the stupidity of the young today. He smiles because a smile is loneliness searching for comfort; searching for a reminder that one is not alone on the planet; acknowledging that you, [you] exist and that the owner of the smile can see, hear, or feel your presence and that makes them happy. Because ultimately we are all connected. I close my eyes and remember one of his smiles. In his old age, Old Man barely has lips. They have succumbed to gravity and wrinkles and biology and have transformed into thin lines. Remnants of fuller ones which once spoke of the fullness of life. I imagine the curve. It is a line. It is endless… it’s attached to many curves, many smiles bowing down to their unquestionable attachment to a single Word. The only Word they all share. The one most spoken, most questioned, most praised, most called upon. He smiles, and the bags of my heaviness suddenly seem just a little bit lighter.