Quiet Time

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us? – Lawrence Durrell

I wasn’t there and if I was, I was sleepwalking.

And really, at the end of the day, what is more human than killing somebody?  If you think about it, he really punched his own ticket himself.

The old man had some quiet time to do serious thinking.  Always like this after he completed a beautification project.

His hearing hadn’t improved, which he figured was normal.  Today somebody introduced rock icon Patti Smith.  The old man heard Pantie Sniff.  Maybe it wasn’t his hearing after all.

Throughout the history of mankind, eons of humanity, most folks didn’t live to be as old as the old man.

Not everything has to be about anything.

He spent too much of his idle time watching real estate porn.  Searching for places to live out his golden years in the sun near the water with a big dog and a little woman.  When he won the lottery.  Every man is a junkie for something.  He was a dreamer with an addictive personality.

He spent too much of his time watching B-movies of cowboys crawling through the desert without water on a broken leg rescuing their wives from cannibalistic troglodyte Indians.  Which is how it felt to grow old.  Old age is not for sissies.  So, he liked tales of survival.  A man may plot his course but God decides.

Hurt to move.  Hurt not to move.  So, the old man kept moving.  His mother taught him that.  Adapt, she said.  Get used to it, she said.

Thought of himself like an iceberg.  Hemingway wrote, ” The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”  He was cold and he was – to a large extent – invisible.  Hemingway also said, “Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.”  Well, there you go.

The old man was an iceberg.  And there was much left unknown.

He read more than most.  Just couldn’t remember shit.

He listened to current artists.  A young friend had just discovered a band and asked the old man, do you like Led Zeppelin?’  Of course, the old man replied.  But, good as they are, after forty years or so, you have heard them.  He was – to be honest – more of a Pearl Jammer.  And some of the new kids aren’t so bad.  Just give them a chance.