The Old Man

I was sleeping in my grandparents’ sewing room. It was a small room at the head of the stairs and beside their only bathroom. My grandmother had moved her old treadle Singer sewing machine away from the back window which overlooked her flower-laden back yard and installed a fold-out bed for me in its stead. My sister and mother shared the front bedroom as we had recently moved in with my mother’s parents. 

My mother had left my stepfather, Sarsfield (Sarge) Burns, after about three years of marriage. I, at the age of twelve, wasn’t entirely unhappy about this development despite my new cramped quarters. Sarge (I never called him Dad) was not a good father or even a mediocre stepfather. He adored my mother and older sister. But he treated me with total indifference other than to use me as a gofer and a grunt. This included lugging bushel baskets of dirt around to fill in holes in the front lawn and fetching his Corona-Corona cigars from the drugstore about a half mile away. No, I didn’t really miss my life with him.

My new bedroom had, to the right of the entry door, two large built-in closets containing my grandparents’ mothballed clothes. Above them were two smaller built-in storage cabinets holding, among many sewing notions, at least a dozen large tin containers of A&P black pepper. I was curious about this hoard until my grandmother told me that, during the war, black pepper was hard to come by. I assumed that she was referring to World War II. This room also had a side window which looked out onto the next-store house across a small dark walkway. It couldn’t have been more that ten feet to this modest home of the Trouts and I could see into its back bedroom like it was an ell of off my own little room. Since their house was shorter than my grandparents’, I looked into this room from behind and above at a slight angle.

My mother, my sister and I stayed with my grandparents for about six months and, throughout I had a clear view into the Trout’s lighted back bedroom. And for this entire period it seemed that nothing went on in this room other than an old man sitting on the edge of his sagging bed that had been pushed against the back wall. I assumed that this sad sack was the father of either Mr. or Mrs. Trout, but since I never saw him outside in their company, I could not be sure. He was a rather gaunt soul with a bit of a paunch, an angular face, and usually, a stubble of whiskers. He sat on the edge of this bed, generally in his gray wool pants, suspenders down, and an old-fashioned armless undershirt, staring at the wall. That’s all I really ever saw him do there -- stare, with a haunting hollow gaze, at that floral wallpaper on the opposite wall. Actually, this is not quite true. He did from time to time hack up some phlegm and spit it a dirty old rag that he held on his knee. Then he went diligently back to his task of trying to stare the budding flowers into bloom ... or the perched birds into flight.

This scene repeated itself over and over -- early morning, late night, or even if I was in my room in the afternoon. He just sat there, staring ... hardly ever moving. Often I would force myself to stay awake late into the night to see something happen. But it never did. A few times I did see him go out of the room presumably to the bathroom, but that seemed the range of his physical activity. He sat there staring ... staring until I thought that he must be mad. Of course, there was no way to know what he was thinking, but I would imagine that he was reliving his life in the foreground of that wallpaper ... dancing, going to war, getting married, playing baseball, harvesting wheat, whatever. He just sat and stared until my grandma’s backyard garden had faded and we had moved away.

And so, while still quite young, I had learned a serious lot about getting old.

Originally published in my Purple Prose blog in 2020.

STAND UP FOR OLD MEN!