Old Timers

They met at a senior center next to a jukebox that only played one record.  Tommy was eating chocolate pudding.  No – Tommy was devouring chocolate pudding.  There was nothing in the world other than his chocolate pudding and the support of the jukebox he leaned against. 

The room was slow motion with other long lived people.  They spoke slow, they danced slow, they played slow games.  Some of them were on the very last lip of life, just before going over the shelf.  Thoughts and memories entered and escaped their minds like the picture of an old a black and white television.  Old men got up for a drink and forgot where they had been sitting.  Women came out of the restroom with the back of their dresses tucked into their underwear.  It was a simple room and a confused room all at once.

There were also a handful of sharp sticks in the bunch.  They moved, danced, and smiled better than people half their age.  These people gravitated toward one another.  They found comfort amongst the well-aged.  For them, the blinding light was quite a ways down the tunnel.  Even the seniors with worn bones and twisted spines were able to interact – if they were mentally acute.  Each weak it was like a game, the mumbling found chairs and mumbled to one another.  The wise found the wise, and the disenchanted found dark corners.

Tommy, elbow deep in chocolate pudding, still had his wits about him.  Arthritis had developed in his fingers over the years, but it only slowed him down when it came to writing longhand.  The woman was Aga.  A Polish transplant sometime in her twenties, now eight-seven.  She wore a dress with elastic shorts underneath.  Flat shoes and dangling earrings, she’d proudly given up high heels in her early sixties.  To her, it wasn’t about age, it was about comfort.  Her hair was still long, but she wore it wrapped up on the back of her neck.

Aga put a dollar in the jukebox.  She reached into her purse and put her glasses on the end of her nose.

“Aren’t many choices.”  Tommy looked over at her from his pudding.  He smiled.

Aga didn’t hear him, but she smiled back.  She chose Superstition by Stevie Wonder. 

By the time the baseline started, Tommy was right over her shoulder.  She turned and stepped on his foot.  To keep from falling over, they grabbed one another by the arms.  There were one hundred and seventy years of life between the two of them.  The life experience was palpable in that moment. 

“Tommy.” He introduced himself, still embraced.  “I’ll send you a bill for the broken toe.”

“Aga.”  She turned a happy kind of red.  “A real man would walk it off.”

They danced that night.  Neither one of them was any good.  Aga might have been good years before, but her hearing couldn’t keep pace with the rhythm.  Tommy didn’t try to be good.  He was built goofy, with long spider legs and spindly arms.  His movements were lose and energetic, which made up for what he lacked in raw technical ability.

Tommy worked up a sweat.  During a song break, he dabbed himself with a handkerchief.  Aga turned and did a bit of a seductive walk toward a table.  Tommy followed.

“What do you call that walk?”

“Everyone assumes a woman grows out of sexy.  I never did.”

The two of them sat and talked until their mouths were dry.  Aga got up and fetched them drinks.  Tommy had eaten too much pudding.  If it wasn’t for the conversation, his heavy eyes would have clamped together for a nap by then.

At the end of the evening, Aga put her hand on Tommy’s knee and said, “There’s something different about you.”

“New teeth,” Tommy bit down and pulled his lips apart.  He was only partially joking.  He’d recently been fitted with new caps on all of his front teeth.  They were big and a little too white for his age, but they went well with his personality.

“No…not the teeth.”

Tommy waited.

“I’ve been married, just once, but I’ve been on more dates than years and I’ll be eight-eight in June.”  She paused and gathered her thoughts.  “We’ve been talking ever since I out danced you – what is that – she squinted down at a thin banded watch.  Two and a half hours.  Two and a half hours of conversation and you haven’t got a clue what I ever did for a living.”

Tommy drank to give himself time to think.  He remembered most of the conversation and sorted through it.  “I know you…you won a contest for painting.  You’re from Poland and you fell off a horse into a river.”

“I didn’t fall into the river.  The horse fell into the river.”

“Close enough.  Well…I know you wear red or white Converse All-Stars, exclusively, for the last ten years.  I know you’re the second best dancer in the room.  You cook for yourself.  You notice when someone has chocolate pudding on their chin.  I think I know enough about you.”

“But what about my career?  What do you think I did for a living?”

“A school nurse?  No!  Wait.  Give me five guesses.  If I don’t get it in five – I don’t want to know.”

Aga crossed her legs and held out her hand with the thumb sticking out.  “School nurse, that’s one.”

“School nurse.  Uh…librarian.  Professional water skier.  Stay at home great grandmother.  That’s four…and lets go with…pediatrician.”

Aga made a noise like an oven timer, “Eeeeeh.”

“Was I close?”

Aga shrugged her shoulders.  “You said if you were wrong, you didn’t want to know.”

“You’re not gonna tell me?”

“You didn’t ask, earlier.  Maybe it’s a good thing.  I don’t want to know what you did for a living either, unless you were a dancer.  Then I’d need to see some proof.”

Tommy put his hand on his chin and leaned closer to Aga.  “From age sixteen to yesterday, everyone asks that question.  ‘What do you do?’  For us it’s ‘What did you do?’  But it always comes up.  What’s your name? Where are you from?  What do you do?  That’s the order.  I guess I got tired of answering it one day.  That had to be forty years ago.  I stopped telling people what I did for a living.  Some people can’t handle that, you know.  They can’t have a secret like that.  They don’t know how to categorize you.  It confuses them.”

“So you don’t ask because you don’t want to categorize people?”

“No.  I still categorize people.  Only two categories:  people I like being around, and people I’d rather not be around.”

“Can I guess what category I’m in?”

“You know pretty fast with me.  It’s no secret.”

Aga blushed and looked at her shoes.

“For us it’s different.  We’re a little older, a little wiser, if you will.  You might have said you were a librarian for forty-nine long years.  You might have loved it, you might have hated it, but that isn’t you.  We sat here for a couple hours and you didn’t bring up library books or Dewey decimals or nothing.  I didn’t ask what you did for a living, but you told me what I needed to know.  I figure if it’s important, we’ll get to it one way or another.”

“I like that,” Aga responded.  “I guess I’ve just grown accustomed to people asking.  If they don’t ask, I usually do.  But, for some reason, I feel the need to ask you.”

Tommy took a sip.  His eyes wandered back over to the table with the bowl of chocolate pudding. 

“I was an electrician, a bullfighter, and a librarian,” Tommy said with a sly smile.

“Now I can’t tell if you’re telling the truth or joking.”

“I am.”