Dreamtime: A Happy Book

Boring

136 Boring “Daddy,” Eliza said turning in her chair and staring down the dinner table at me, “you are the only old person I have ever really known.” Eliza’s grandparents died before becoming fixed in her memory. Moreover Eliza grew up in a university town populated by people who left home in order to teach, forsaking place and parents. In contrast the fathers and mothers of my childhood friends settled near home. Like their parents, most were born in and around Nashville. As a result the grandparents and sometimes the great-grandparents of my friends were people whom I knew and saw often. When I was a boy, more old than young people were my friends. They and the stories, both of their lives and those they told, appointed my days and imagination. The doings of some men were practically mythological, descents in sundry underworlds followed by recoveries into near virtue being common. I spent glorious hours in living rooms, mandarins fluttering like butterflies around tall Chinese vases, chair covers ripe with chintz orchards of fruit, on walls family members in gold leaf, their expressions somber, lips pursed on the edge of reproof, and then always, ancient ladies patting me on the hand while looking at Mother and saying, “Sammy, you are the most wonderful boy.” The young me recognized old age as a beloved player in the community theater of my days, a regional theater to be sure, but one that was warming and entertaining. For Eliza old age is almost synonymous with boredom, and in truth I have become bored and boring. Decades ago when I sailed easily above tedium buoyed aloft by a carpet of magical possibilities, I said that only the one eyed and hidebound became bored. I shucked routine as easily as I did corn, peeling away the present, one moment wandering the Grand Trunk Road with Kipling’s Kim, the next slogging across the Arabian sands with Wilfred Thesiger. Alas my vision has shrunk; not even the lens of imagination can force possibility into Boring | 137 whelping. Moreover I have become immune to the opiates that intrigue and satisfy crowds of people my age—wars, politics, and sports. I never mainlined athletics, but until this winter I ran a handful of road races each year. In November, however, pain began screwing across my hip and winding down my thigh, grinding bounce from my stride. I still try to jog. I am not successful. A woman in a nearby house suffers from dementia. She spends hours scouring her yard. She picks three or four leaves at a time off the ground, after which she crosses the street and throws the leaves into a neighbor’s yard. Last week as I jogged up the street, she paused in the middle of the road, leaves in her left hand and stared at me. Plaque smothers her thought like a quilt, but she had mind enough to ask me, “Are you running or walking?” Usually I run with Harry, Tim, and David. They are all over seventy, making me at sixtyeight the freshman of the group. We talk about, as Tennyson put it in “The Princess,” “the days that are no more.” Occasionally we lament the change counting cholesterol has imposed upon eating. No more can we indulge our hankerings for pork cake. My biceps and triceps, Vicki said last month, have become jellceps. Medicinal matters constitute a staple of our conversation, not a subject that interests Eliza. Instead of figurines, tools, or even books, we collect diagnoses: torpid bowel, fallen womb, deranged kidneys, and disagreeable feelings in the urinary organs and in, as country folk put it, the “prosfate,” ailments that rarely kill but that instead are restoratives, invigorating and enlivening our jogs. Occasionally a remark almost makes us skip like fibrillations, David’s saying last week, “Life is a tiresome journey, and when a man arrives at the end, he is generally out of breath.” Once the English department was saucy with biting, questionable humor. Now the department bores me. Almost all my friends, old boys of course, have retired or pegged out, their places filled by comparatively young women. Moreover the male English major is an endangered species. “There were so many females and so few males in the building,” my friend Josh reported last week after dropping a book off in my office, “that I thought I’d stumbled into the lobby of an ob-gyn clinic.” The “new” female faculty...