“You know you’re getting old when you stoop to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you’re down there.”---George Burns
During the final days of the fearsome LDS (Latter Day Shoppers) onslaught, I hacked my way through the jungles of Jonesville to deliver a Christmas gift to everybody’s favorite curmudgeon, Chuck LeMasters. If you’re going to see Chuck, you’ll want to stop at his mailbox to gather up the vast accumulation of worthless advertising fliers, Social Security bulletins, greetings of the season and seed catalogues which he blithely ignores until someone like me notices it spilling to the ground and comes to the rescue.
“You look good!” LeMasters chirped in greeting. Old people always say this to one another out of Christian charity even though it’s almost inevitably a boldfaced lie. Later that afternoon, I was scheduled for a visit with my dermatologist to find out why pieces of my face kept falling off. Turned out it was just another prelude to basal cell carcinoma, easily treated with two weeks of cancer-killing Tolak cream, which leaves your visage looking like twenty miles of bad road, full of ruts and scary. This was not my first encounter with the fiend who will apparently not be satisfied until my nose has completely disappeared and been replaced by a carrot.
What Chuck really meant was “You don’t look too bad for an 83-year-old geezer after prostate cancer, heart issues, two divorces, a half-dozen arrests, rolling your Toronado and hanging out with crazed hippies for 25 years.” None of us are being recruited for modeling jobs if you discount Anna Marie Kirkpatrick, who looks like she just got out of high school and is reputed to be a distant cousin of Dorian Gray. Getting old is bad enough without having to worry about looking so gnarly you’re scaring little kids. Those of us who someday opt for plastic surgery aren’t trying to impress other people, we just want to see a reasonably pleasant face looking back from the mirror. If you don’t look like the ruins of Pompeii, maybe the Grim Reaper won’t notice and he’ll pass you by. Or you could be a professional sports fan with an abominable winless team and wear one of those bags over your head all the time. Then again, if your team was that bad perhaps the end couldn’t come too soon.
Life In Your Seventies
Many of our readers live in the land of Septuagenaria, where the food is bland and they roll the sidewalks up at six p.m. It’s a scary place where memories blink on and off, automobiles appear out of nowhere in neighboring lanes, the stairs are steeper and your friends seem to be dropping like iguanas on a cold night in Boca. Adding to the confusion, the neighborhood keeps changing and Joe’s Friendly Tavern turns into an Apple store overnight. The buildings get taller, nobody walks down the street any more and now you have to check out your own groceries. Whatever happened to Madge, the cashier and Zora, the funny bagger who had a joke at the ready every Saturday?
But say all the above is merely a flyspeck on the windshield of life in your seventies. They say Love is all you need, right? Alas, for many people, especially the female variety, their partners of decades have gone over the hill or under it and they are now alone, looking for company. What they soon discover is that the produce out there in the Possible Partner Grocery Store is more like that of Walmart than Publix. A little wilted, occasionally possessed of an unpleasant odor, suspect in texture and possibly spoiled. Now and then dry, bitter to the taste, inedible. If only they could complain to the management and get a promise of better quality.
The alternative, of course, is singlehood. Many people swear by it, but what if you fall in the garage and can’t get up? What do you do on Couples Night at the Grange? Who drives you to the emergency room when your gout acts up or you suddenly realize you are Empress Theodora of the Byzantine Empire? Irving next door might be a lecherous old toad but he does have a new chauffeur’s license and all his teeth. You can always hide those economy size dispensers of Old Spice cologne and revamp his wardrobe from Rural King. Nobody ever said romance in your seventies would be easy, but Mick Jagger gave us some good advice: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime you’ll find you get what you need.” Easy for him to say, right?
The Life And Times Of Naked Ed (with excerpts from Amy Reinink)
Naked Ed could always tell where he was by the feel of the earth beneath his feet. When the dry leaves crackled under his gnarled toes, he knew he was close to the dirt road leading from Poe Springs Road to Lily Springs. When his feet sunk into the loamy silt near the springs, he knew he was home. “I’m part of the springs, they’re part of me,” claimed Ed Watts, aka Naked Ed due to his propensity to wear a mere loincloth or even nothing at all when greeting canoers from the banks of the river. “I tell people I’m just like the trees, ‘cept I move around a little more.”
Ed never owned the slightest bit of the swath of wooded land he called home in the northeast corner of Gilchrist County between the Santa Fe River and the clear turquoise waters of Lilly Springs. Nonetheless, he regarded himself the caretaker of the property and its official greeter. Canoers often said a trip down the Santa Fe wasn’t complete without a visit with Naked Ed on the deck he built above the water or in his 8x10 hut created with simple pine boards.
We met Ed back in the day while searching for exceptional photo locations on the river. He knew them all and insisted on guiding us to each. “I love people,” he told us, “but I’m not so sure about civilization.” The short man with leathery skin, a bushy beard and a soft, round belly had spindly legs, knobby from brittle-bone disease, a health problem he was born with that eventually caused him to stop working. Ed once peddled groceries, delivered newspapers and worked on a commercial fishing boat before he started receiving government disability checks in his mid-thirties.
“Even if I had the money, I could never live in one of those ‘facilities,’ as they call them,” Ed told us. “I have friends in some of those places and they feel safe but not happy.” When people asked him about the dangers of living outside, the threats from alligators and other dangerous animals, Watts smiled and told them “The only animal I have to worry about is my fellow man. I feel as attached to these springs as some people do to their families. I feel free and my days are my own. Being a little uncomfortable every now and then isn’t the worst thing in the world. I would love to be sitting out here as I drew my last breath.”
And that he did on Christmas weekend, 2023. We’re not sure where he was sitting at the time, but we know where he is now. Keep your eyes open on each turn of the river, you don’t want to miss one last chance to see Naked Ed dancing through the woods. You might even want to join him
Septuagenarian Traits
1.---They enjoy appending “the” to words even when it’s unnecessary, as in “the Facebook” and “the Google.”
2.---They beam with excitement when finding their cars in large parking lots.
3.---They’re on a cruise, just back from one or looking into going.
4.---They are obsessed with The Weather Channel. It doesn’t hurt to know if it’s raining in South Carolina.
5.---They get upset when younger people don’t wear coats in cool weather.
6.---They feel uncomfortable in new surroundings. A wary grandmother visiting Starbucks for the first time struggled with her order, but finally made it. The barista, as always, asked “Can I get a name for your drink?” A little confused, the lady smiled and said. “I guess you could just call it ‘Bob.’”
7.---They don’t know how Uber works and they don’t want to know.
8.---If you gift them a Roomba, they will follow it around. “I don’t trust those things,” says Grandma Lulu. “What if they start a fire or scratch the linoleum? What if they scare the daylights out of my cat?”
Just A Closer Walk With Thee
“There are no atheists in the foxholes.”---W. T. Cummings
Not many, anyway. For those of us in the ultimate foxholes, the advisory, “Dead is forever!” lacks a certain charm, puts a distinct damper on our joie de vivre, cramps our style, as it were. We know better but we can’t help wondering if all those Hindus and Buddhists might be right and humans get to enjoy reincarnation, multiple lives, another go-‘round where Karma spins the wheel and we might come back as either princess or pauper. Claudine Laabs, not a foolish woman, insisted she remembers living an earlier life as Cleopatra’s housecat, so who knows? If it’s to be a feline existence, however, can we opt for Garfield or maybe Sylvester?
We suspect the Cosmic Arranger is onto our latter-day tricks and will reserve the best outcomes for his old pals like Johnny Bolton, a Subterranean Circus employee from the late 1960s who took his game to Ketchum, Idaho, went into the construction business there and eventually opened a successful dojo. Johnny passed from this mortal orb unexpectedly just before Christmas despite appearing a hale and hardy physical specimen who took good care of his body and soul for most of his life. Pancreatic cancer will do that to you. Despite a slight regression into hippiehood in his twenties, with all the venial sins that go with it, J. B. never outgrew his belief in a supreme being, as evidenced by a conversation we had with him a few years ago while visiting Johnny and Michael Hatcherson in the hills of Idaho.
Leaving a drugstore, a tiny girl ran past me into the parking lot, her exasperated mother screaming at her to stop. She was a hair’s breadth from an oncoming car when I reached over with one arm and scooped her up and out of trouble. This was no accidental occurrence to Johnny Bolton.
“I’m grateful that I live here and Jesus brought you here at this time and place to save that little girl’s life,” he said, without a shred of doubt. Gee, Johnny, don’t I even get an “Attaboy!” for my trouble? Isn’t there an old bible song called “I’m Only a Pawn On The Master’s Chessboard?”
Those of us who abstain from religious promises of a heavenly future lead a crueler existence than that of our compadres who believe. Like the suddenly faithful in the foxholes, they fade away in the assurance of "a better home awaiting in the sky, Lord, in the sky” while we sit here and await the arrival of nothingness, no hope in sight. Even UFO buff Gary Borse has his alien ace in the hole. Maybe there is such a thing as being too smart for your own good.
That’s all, folks….
