Visiting the Old, And Other Memories

Proving That Good Deeds Never Go Unpunished

Remember those awful ordeals of kid-hood when your parents – your mother mostly, though your father didn’t speak up to spare you either – took you to visit old people on holidays or Sunday afternoons? Made you go, dragged you more like. You had no idea who they were - relatives of some sort, perhaps - maybe rich ones, because why else would your parents put you through such torture except for the possibility of lucrative inheritances? But at that age, you had no concept of inheritance, only torture.

Old people who smelled "strange" – i.e. BAD; perhaps the smell of death, off-putting even when you were young and didn’t know much about it. Sometimes you even had to touch them, their wrinkled, blotched, papery skin. Or they would touch you! With long white claw fingers, cloudy finger nails, reaching out towards you like talons! And the horrifying smiles on their faces and gleams in their eyes, as though they could taste already the succulent, sweet flesh of kid on their dripping, drooling tongues. And perhaps not even rich, since they lived in ramshackle houses with peeling paint as blotched as their own spotted skin, houses that smelled as “strange” (i.e. BAD) as they did themselves.

Horrifying! And no one swooped in to save you, yank you back – pushed you forward, in fact, a human sacrifice on the altar of Good Deeds.

Though these memories seem long ago, in the great scheme of things they happened yesterday (or rather, only minutes ago, more like). And now here you are, old yourself, skin as crinkled as the tissue paper that covered those ancient claws of yesteryear. And you sit alone in your decrepit lair contemplating Death – though “contemplate” is too pale a term; but how do you put into adequate words the dreads that inhabit the night? – thinking, perhaps, how lovely it would be if someone came to visit, someone young and full of life and future, instead of only death and past, as you now (so soon!) fear is all that remains for you.

I never met any of my grandparents. I've wondered if that might have been a way of learning to love, or tolerate at least, old people in a less frightening way - that "special bond" that the myth says exists between grands. But all of mine had already departed before I arrived.

Or so I thought. Turns out my father’s father still walked the earth when I was 10 – one of the shocking things I learned after my own father’s death. Among his papers I found a letter from Gramps. I’ll call him that; don’t know what I’d have called him if we’d had the chance to share that special bond.

Though I suppose there’s the chance it wouldn’t have been much of a bond, no matter how special. Clearly he, and his own son, my dad, did not bond, at some fundamental level, since Dad always said - or, come to think of it, perhaps only allowed the assumption to persist – that his own father had “passed on” years before. Which, for purposes of meaningful human bonding, I guess was true.

What could it have been, I wonder, that caused a rift so deep that my father considered his father dead decades before the death? Drinking and wild living (my father); a new wife replacing a beloved mother, a step-mother even younger than her step children (spouse number two for Gramps); some other disappointment of one or both that could not be overcome? I’ll never know.

I only know the little that I do because of that letter that I found, written in Maine and mailed to Texas, with the notations on the envelope in my father’s hand, dual notations (in case only one might not be enough to highlight the importance of the document when Dad looked back at it in his own old age?): “Last letter from Dad” “last letter from Charlie”:

“Dear Roger - I will Try and write you a few lines we are all about the same here are you all well I hope There is plenty of Snow here now I hope it wont last very much longer I suppose you have warm weather now – well I am 78 years old here now and it wont be much longer now it does not seem ten year since you went away but I suppose Time passes fast your boy is quite a boy he does not look like you he must look like his Mother … I hope I will see you in the spring well my boy I think of you often and wonder if you are all right well I will say good by as there is not much to write about … give my love to your boy I probably will never see him Love daddy”

No, he never did see me, nor I him: he dated his letter March 1; the envelope bears the postmark March 5; according to the records, he died March 11. All the same year.

No, he didn’t see me. Not in the flesh, that is. The shocking realization, based on what he says in his letter, is that he even knew about me, that he must have seen me in a photo – this Gramps I had no idea still lived, and never saw, even in a photo. My father must have sent him one – or perhaps a still loved sister passed it on. I did know of her existence, though even she was just a name. It was a long way from Maine to Texas then.

In a way, the three of us have come together at this moment, all as old people, the same age, give or take a year or two – Gramps when he wrote his letter; Dad when he died, and so I found it; me, now an old man myself. I won’t say it freaks me out that I now stand squarely between the ages at which they died. But it does, sort of. Surely I have a shot at long outliving both of them, what with the advances of modern medicine, my own clean living – drinking and wild nights are in the past – and no young wife to wear me out. Surely another good 10 years, at least. And maybe a few more as the good wears off.

But back to visiting the old, where I began. I had no idea when I started that those two old men would be coming to visit me today. Or that I could so quickly become again that child repulsed by tissue-paper skin. The difference: they’re both gone long ago, so this time I’m the one reaching out an old claw hand toward them.

My God, what if they grab it and yank me forward?! I’m not sure I’m quite ready to go visit them, no matter how ramshackle an old person I’ve become (so soon!). But what is that smell? Do you smell it? Could it be … ?