Old Men: Sketches of a Time in Life

By Paul T. Bryant

Over his eighty-plus years, Paul T. Bryant has worked as a farm and ranch hand, soldier, forest-fire lookout, park ranger naturalist, editor, teacher, and academic administrator. He has lived and worked in a variety of states, from Washington to North Carolina and from Texas to Massachusetts, filling in those spans with time in Oklahoma, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Illinois, and Virginia. He brings this range of experience to this series of short stories and sketches of various old mentheir lives, their problems, and how they have met those problems. These are fiction, but they draw on actual experience.

Old age is a challenging time for old men and old women alike. As more and more of us reach this challenging time, we can profit from learning how others have met those challenges or failed to do so. By the same token, perhaps those who have not yet reached old age will find here some increased understanding for those who have.
Other books by Bryant: H. L. Davis (1978), Confessions of an Habitual Administrator (2005).

Book Review

An eclectic collection of short fiction and poetry explores the challenges faced by men as they age. The author, now in his 80s, begins with a prologue reminding readers that old age is neither a crime nor a sin, but merely another stage of life with challenges and potential triumphs. Reflecting on the fact that more and more people are living to advanced ages, Bryant offers his work as a report on the road conditions from one who has traveled it, to those coming up behind him. Although his book has an explicitly didactic purpose, this does not mean that the authors stories and poems are in any way moralizingnor do they offer easy solutions to the problems of old age such as aimlessness, solitude, pain or the possibility of an afterlife. However its true that Bryants intention are not purely literary. Although told with unusual stylistic concision and vigor only rarely marred by clichd expressions such as references to wind sighing through the pine needles on a mountain slope or a spirited game of touch footballthese fictions do not aspire to aesthetic independence, but rather aim at maximum clarity in representing common experiences. In the process, they reveal the authors deeply humane insight into a wide variety of human types, ranging from retired businessmen, to minor poets and academics, to American Indians before the arrival of European settlers. Although incidental to his main aims, Bryants use of the variety of American geography and history also showcases his deep knowledge of these subjects, thus providing another opportunity for readers to learn from this book. What one storys narrator says about an old farmhand could equally be applied to the author of this collectionWe should treasure people like Stuart Wellborn, people who know and love the land and who can tell its story.

Crisp, quietly learned storytelling offers subtle insights into the experience of aging.

-Kirkus Discoveries

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 21, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462836161

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 by Paul T. Bryant.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2009906061

ISBN:         Hardcover                                978-1-4415-4750-7

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4415-4749-1

                   Ebook                                      9781462836161

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Dedication

Preface

Prologue

Getting the Picture

Once Were

The Sky Is Still Blue

End Game

Tai Chi Chuan

Old Ranchers

Choices

Into the Mountains

In the Game

Winter Wood

Rubber Tramp

Why?

Survivors

The Barn

Johnny Blackeagle

History

Dreams

Mr. Franklin

The Sergeants

Not Like an Old Man

For the Fathers

Circling the Wagons

Not So Bad

Hearing

Memories

Change

Legacy

Walking Bear

Spectra

Generations

Remembering the Land

Streaks

Anger

Yet Another Christmas

To the Station

Dedication

To our young men, in hopes it will give them some idea of what to expect

when they grow old, and to our old men, who provided the material for what is here.

Preface

How should we define an old man? Does it depend on declining physical ability? Slower reaction time? Less mental agility? Attitude? Is it merely chronological? Some men may think and act as if they are old by the age of forty. Others may seem youthful and vigorous at the age of sixty, seventy, or eighty. I have a friend, who in his nineties, still plays a good game of tennis, and other friends, who at sixty, could not run the length of the court. Age seems to be a relative matter in many ways.

Many of our definitions of old depend upon the cultural context. In a warrior/hunter society, in which life spans are relatively short and physical prowess is very important, a man in his forties might be considered an elder, and a man in his fifties is probably considered old. Parallels in our society might be our professional athletes. An athlete in his thirties is a veteran. An athlete still playing at a high level past forty—George Blanda, Nolan Ryan, for example—is a phenomenon to be noted.

On the other hand, in business, finance, many of the creative arts, and other modern occupations, physical ability above a certain minimum function may be of little importance, so long as mental energy and acuity remain. Is a vigorous, highly effective corporate CEO in his seventies old? Is he older than the dispirited fifty-year-old who has failed in business and cannot find the energy and resolve to try again?

This is not to say that everything is relative, but perhaps there needs to be a conceptual sliding scale when we consider men old, depending on health, occupation, cultural context, and attitude.

Society has set down certain traditional markers defining the line between middle age and old age: the traditional retirement age has long been sixty-five. As people live longer, this traditional line is gradually moving upward, but it is still in the sixties. So let us use the sixties as a general dividing line, with allowances for special circumstances. In general, men in their sixties and above will be my subject. I hope you find their stories interesting. Perhaps you will find here a parallel to someone you know. If so, I hope this helps you gain insight and understanding.

Paul T. Bryant

Arden, North Carolina

May 2009

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are—

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

—Tennyson, Ulysses

Prologue

Old age is neither a crime nor a sin. It is not even a character flaw, although some (young) idealists say we should no longer encumber the earth once our life’s vigor is past. Still, old age happens to everyone who lives long enough, despite our society’s emphasis on youth and our sometimes grotesque attempts to cling to it. Given the fact that old age is happening to more and more of us these days, perhaps it would be useful to examine how life looks when we awaken one morning, look in the mirror, and find to our amazement that we have grown old.

It has been said that old age is not for sissies. The challenges are not only the inevitable loss of strength, endurance, and energy and the accumulation of aches and pains that come from the wear and tear of a life lived vigorously, perhaps even adventurously. The challenges come also from the realization that one will not live forever; that the end may soon come into sight; that one’s future is, for the most part, in the past; that those unrealized ambitions will likely remain unrealized. Facing such awareness, the challenge to the spirit may be more severe than the physical challenge of a worn and battered body.

Even wisdom earned through years of hard experience may seem of little consequence to younger friends. Somehow, moving and speaking a little more slowly, even reflecting at greater length before speaking at all, is regarded as more characteristic of the senile than of the sagacious. Each generation prefers to make its own mistakes, which is why historians are regarded more as storytellers than as analysts of human affairs or as advisers concerning the future.

Confronting these challenges is a whole new adventure in life, a test of courage, of spirit, of one’s beliefs. It is a new chapter in one’s story. It may not be flamboyant or overtly dramatic or even visible to others, but it is a final test that must be met. Some fail that test. Some pass, even surpass, the test with strength of spirit and abiding courage.

Yet old age is not always a process of loss. As at any other time of life, some—through wisdom, courage, strength of spirit, or perhaps just plain good luck—may achieve great happiness, great knowledge, great ambitions, and great satisfaction. Old age need not be a time only of retreat, and certainly not a time of hopelessness.

These are a few sketches of how various old men in various circumstances have faced up to the test. Old women have their tests, too, just as demanding and important, but those are for a different set of accounts. These are not all stories as such. Some are just glimpses of lives, brief looks at a stage in life that every man who does not die young must face.

In old age, questions of an afterlife may often occur. Knowing that the end of this life is near will naturally lead an old man to wonder what, if anything, comes next. Some may dismiss the idea of an afterlife out of hand. Some may have a settled religious belief that assures an afterlife and gives some idea of what it will be like. Some may simply wonder, and perhaps hope.

I have imagined some of the thoughts and dialogue and arranged some of the events for coherence and, of course, changed the names, but the circumstances are drawn from my experience and from experiences I have heard about. There may be little room for open, public heroism here, but there is plenty of room for significant life. Certainly, there are plenty of occasions for that quiet, internal heroism that does not garner medals or applause but affirms the stubborn strength of the human spirit. How the remaining life of an old man is to be lived can be of some interest, at least to those who live it.

For the rest, perhaps these sketches will at least stimulate understanding and tolerance. If we move slowly, speak slowly, sometimes do not hear clearly, sometimes are forgetful or absentminded, we were once young and quick. We may cling unreasonably to the old ways and resist change, but we have mastered many changes in the past. In the language of the Old West, most of us have seen the elephant. That should earn us some respect, some patience with our old men’s ways.

Getting the Picture

When Walt Ironsen celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday, he retired. Of average height for his generation—perhaps an inch below six feet—he was still trim, healthy, and full of energy. He looked younger than he was. Even his blond head of hair was still thick, healthy, and only slightly touched with white at the temples. But he had always considered sixty-five to be the traditional retirement age, and he was one for tradition. He was secure financially and thought he would like to take things easy for a change.

He turned the running of their men’s clothing store over to Walt Junior. Junior had worked in the store for years, part-time through high school, full-time after graduating from college with a business degree. He knew the business thoroughly and was as good at it as his father. In fact, he was sharper at anticipating style trends and the preferences of young men. Walt Senior had still not quite understood the extent and speed with which style changes in men’s clothing were penetrating even to smaller Midwestern cities like Centerville.

Centerville had become more than a rural, county seat town. As the back roads had been improved over the years, it had drawn in shoppers from a wider area, until it had become a small city, a regional shopping center. It was still a quiet, conservative Midwestern community, but it was big enough, and busy enough, to support a major men’s clothing store, if that store was properly managed.

The transition of management should have been smooth and effortless given Junior’s long experience. To an extent, it was. The only problem was that Walt Senior could not let go. Over long years of hard work, he had built a prosperous and respected clothing store from the meager beginnings of a tiny shop selling shirts and ties. It was, in a sense, his life’s work. He could not bring himself to walk away from it. In addition, he continued as part owner, sharing in the profits.

He left Junior with all the day-to-day headaches and responsibilities; but he was continually looking over Junior’s shoulder, questioning, commenting, objecting, sometimes countermanding Junior’s decisions with the sales staff or with stock orders.

Junior put up with his father’s interference longer than his sales staff thought he would, but there finally came a limit. One day, when Junior learned that a major part of his order for the summer stock had been canceled, he hit his limit. He went into his office, reviewed his account books, had a long conversation on the telephone with his banker, then called his father at home.

Dad, we need to talk. Can I come out to the house?

Talk about what?

The store.

Good. I have some ideas about a sale promotion. And I think we’re getting too flashy in our summer fashions. I canceled most of your order.

Junior took a deep breath and resolved to be calm but firm. Yes, I know, but that’s only part of what I want to talk about, Dad. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.

The result of that talk, which was long and sometimes painful, was that Junior bought out his father and became sole owner of the clothing store. With a loan from the bank, and some of his savings, Junior paid cash and gave his dad a good price. Once the deal was complete, Walt was gently given to understand that he was welcome at the store, that his advice would be valued, but that he had no authority to make decisions there. The staff was so instructed. They were greatly relieved to know, finally, who was in charge.

That left Walt with a substantial new nest egg and a lot of spare time.

At first he thought he would spend that time helping out at home. He already did the yard work. It was a small yard in a quiet, suburban neighborhood—level, smooth, with a couple of nice shade trees and a modest expanse of grass. The flower beds contained mostly perennials, and he had long since given up on the small vegetable garden in the back yard. That had gone back to lawn. There was not much yard work to do, and it was mostly seasonal. All his life he had been busy all day, every day. At that pace, he soon ran out of things to do in the yard. He made some minor house repairs, did some touch-up painting, but that didn’t last long. Then to his wife’s dismay, he tried to help around the house.

Louise Ironsen was a handsome, intelligent, vigorous woman, a few years younger than Walt. She was careful and efficient, and she knew her own mind. She was a planner. When she got out of bed in the morning, she knew what she wanted to accomplish that day, and in what order. But she did not like to have to explain it, even to Walt. She was a doer, not a talker. She did not need, or particularly want, help with the household.

What can I do to help? he would ask, standing empty-handed and clueless in the doorway to the kitchen. Louise would put him to setting the table or peeling potatoes or scraping carrots, but he was so much slower at these tasks than she was that he was more in the way than he was helpful.

With the best of intentions, Walt’s efforts around the house often became more annoyance than help. Finally, he found a few simple chores that he could do competently and that Louise was willing to concede to him. He set the table for the meal, put on the breakfast coffee, carried out the trash, sometimes vacuumed the living room rug. Still, that left him with a lot of spare time, a circumstance that made him restless, even edgy. Since childhood, he had found very little spare time. Always there had been work to do. Now the work was done; but he still had health, energy, and an active mind. He fidgeted around the house, rummaged in the files in his study, refused to succumb to the mental opiate of daytime television. It was a problem.

An answer came when he tackled one of the chores Louise had suggested to him—more, in her mind, to get him out from under foot than to accomplish anything significant.

Remember that big wooden box in the attic? she asked one day. It’s full of family records, letters, and pictures that we kept when we cleaned out your parents’ house after your mother died.

Mostly junk, Walt said.

Well, then, sort through it, pick out the junk, and throw it away. Label what you keep and then we should store it more carefully to preserve it.

So one fall afternoon, when the attic was neither too hot nor too cold, Walt went up, dusted off the top of the old footlocker, opened it, and began to explore.

What he found was an unexpected trove of family history. There were letters going back three generations, bank statements, scrapbooks, yellowed and crumbling newspaper clippings of his father’s exploits as a high school athlete, even letters from his great-grandfather to his great-grandmother during service in the Civil War. Best of all, to Walt’s mind, were the old photographs. Some were labeled, some he could identify, and some he could only guess the identity of the people and the places.

Walt was captivated. He spent many afternoons in the attic, then brought all the material downstairs to his study. He found very little that he could bring himself to throw away, to Louise’s dismay.

How much of this can we get rid of? Louise would ask, surveying the piles of papers and photographs that filled every horizontal space in Walt’s study.

This is all good stuff, Walt would reply earnestly. We’ll want to pass this along to Junior. He needs to know his family’s history. I just need to get it in order.

Louise had an opinion of how Junior’s wife, Cynthia, would react when Walt came presenting them with a big box of old papers, but she kept that opinion to herself.

Walt finally did toss out some of the unidentified photographs and some of the crumbling old newspapers and moth-eaten high school pennants; but he had found something on which he could spend his time, energy, and curiosity—his family’s history.

Genealogy was a part of it, but he went beyond tracing relationships. He wanted to know who these people were, what they did, how they lived their lives. He would gather all the information he could find about his grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles and aunts, great-uncles and great-aunts, the whole lot back for generations. He combed through county and church records both in Centerville and back east. He looked at federal immigration and military service records. He read widely in history books to get the context in which his forebears had lived. Then if he had pictures of any of them, he would spend hours looking at those pictures and matching them with the information he had gathered. He came to understand their kinships and the arcs of their lives, their trials, and their triumphs. He found it moving to look at the young, hopeful faces in some of the pictures, knowing what their lives had been later, how their hopes and loves and ambitions had been realized or failed, and how their lives had ended at last.

Among the many photographs, Walt found that he had good large portraits of his father and his grandfather Ironsen. He thought it would be a nice idea to get a photograph of himself so he could someday give Walt Junior the portraits of three generations of Ironsen men. As he thought about this, Walt vaguely remembered having seen a photograph of his great-grandfather, Frederick Christian Ironsen. He had been a Danish sea captain who had come to America in the 1850s, fought in the Union army during the Civil War, prospered as a merchant and banker after the war, and sired a house full of offspring. The photograph showed him as an older man with a lean face, chin whiskers, and a hard and almost belligerent stare at the camera. When and where had he seen that picture?

Walt presented the question to Louise, and together they puzzled it out. They had seen that photograph in the home of an older distant cousin years before. The cousin had lived in a town some distance away, and they had not kept contact after that visit. Walt wondered if the cousin would sell him the picture or allow him to have it copied. He was much taken with the idea of pictures of four generations of Ironsen men to give his son, who, in due course, could add a picture of a fifth generation to give to his son.

Walt soon found that his elderly cousin had died the previous year. When he reached her son, he was told that the contents of her house, including the photograph, had been auctioned off in the dispersal of the estate. Family ties and family history apparently meant little to that branch of the family. And no, the son did not have a record of who had bought the elaborately framed photograph. It might have been bought for the antique frame, and the picture might have been destroyed.

Walt was deeply disappointed. He had gotten wrapped up in his family history and was counting on having a picture gallery of the generations of Ironsen men. He moped around the house for days, shuffling half-heartedly among his memorabilia but not really showing his former enthusiasm for the project. He was so gloomy that Louise decided he needed a diversion, something to get his mind off his disappointment. A practical woman, she felt he needed to get back his old interest in tasks at hand rather than brooding over something that could not be helped.

Late one afternoon, with this in mind, she stopped in the doorway to Walt’s study. Let’s go out for dinner tonight, she said, trying to sound as if the thought had just struck her.

Hmm? said Walt, looking up from the index he was half-heartedly working on for the family history files. Oh, OK. Where?

Well, Louise said, looking thoughtful, although she knew exactly where., Henry Warren has opened a new restaurant out near the Interstate. We could go out there and see what it’s like.

Walt smiled. Will he let us in? If he does, will he poison our food?

Now Walt, Louise said, give him a chance to let bygones be bygones.

Walt agreed, but without enthusiasm.

Those bygones had been a few years of intense competition between Walt’s clothing store and one owned and operated by Henry Warren. The contest was unequal at last. Walt was the better businessman. He kept a closer eye on staff and expenses. He always had the items that were selling well without seriously overstocking. He was a better planner. He was a better salesman.

After a few years of barely getting by with men’s clothing, in the face of Walt’s competition, Henry Warren had finally sold out for what he could get and gotten out of the clothing business. He went on to various other, and only marginally successful, business ventures—real estate, insurance, wherever he could turn a dollar and make a living. Yet even after years away from the clothing store, he remained cool toward Walt, blaming him, in some sense, for his own financial struggles. Walt regretted their estrangement but had made no special effort to remedy it.

Now Henry Warren had a new restaurant. Walt could not guess where he had found the financial backing but found it he had, and the new establishment was up and running. Good restaurants were scarce in Centerville. Perhaps he could succeed in this venture.

So Walt and Louise went to dinner that night at Henry Warren’s restaurant. The building was new, placed strategically on the road into town from the nearby new Interstate highway. The location could attract both townsfolk and travelers. With his businessman’s eye, Walt noted the good location, the ample parking, the prominent but reasonably tasteful sign proclaiming the establishment’s presence.

Inside, the decor was what might be called rural nostalgic. The furniture was rustic. The dark wood walls were hung in profusion with old tools, old implements, and old advertising signs. There were ice saws, bucksaws, crosscut saws, kerosene lanterns, washboards, hand-cranked wringers, hand-cranked corn shellers, drawknives, froes, wooden mallets, a whole range of hand tools and devices from the nineteenth-century farm. There were horsecollars, hames, singletrees and doubletrees, draft horseshoes, bridles, and bits. There was a sidesaddle. There were old wooden and metal signs advertising chewing tobacco, baking powder, flour, beer, lye soap, dry goods, and patent medicines.

An antique cradle scythe dangled overhead, barely emerging from the darkness of the ceiling above. Walt half-expected to see the Grim Reaper emerge from the upper darkness and begin wielding the scythe among the patrons. Walt smiled at the fancy, but admitted to himself that the dangling scythe did look a little ominous against the upper darkness.

There were also old photographs. After having studied so many of his