The Old Man and the Sea |
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20 November 2020
The old man was weary from life and barely running. Once when he was young and training to be an officer the black recruits had called him white lightning. But not today. Today it took some time to overtake the woman with the stroller. Still the old man ran. He didn't run because he was fast, but because running cleared his mind. There was much on his mind these days to deal with. Least of which was the age that was slowly wearing down his body. At the top was the spawn of that body; spawn he could not talk to.
He also ran because he needed more firewood. On the island a cold wind had started blowing and he no longer went swimming. He was not so bothered by the cold of the North Sea. Neither was he much bothered by those who said swimming alone was foolish. When it was his time to go, he would go. The old man felt many years lay ahead of him though. Enduring those years was what wore him down. He was alone there in his little hytta on the island in the North Sea. And alone was something he didn't much enjoy. So today he ran.
It was only a few kilometers to the store with the firewood. Once he had run ten times that distance, but today he was weary after four. The weariness was not so much in his body as in his soul. It was this weariness, though, which lead him to miscalculate the time and arrive too late to the store to catch the bus with the firewood home. If he only needed one bag he could have just run with it on his shoulders. He'd done it before. But that was the summer when a bag was plenty for a week. The cold wind of autumn was not so lenient.
The old man thus arrived with two hours to kill. What to kill the hours with? A pub was a surefire way to kill hours, but, alas, there was no pub there on the island by the store. So the old man went to the bookstore. From shelf to shelf he went, but nowhere did he find a book in his native tongue. He could read their language, but it wasn't his. And the old man did not have the patience nor the energy to wade through that today. So he wondered among the shops, numb in his soul but still sweaty from his run. He did not drag his feet, but he hung his head and failed to look at the other shoppers.
It was early afternoon, so there was no where open yet to eat either. Why had the old man not calculated better; not run faster? He wondered if failure and exhaustion were to be the characteristics of his later years. As all youthful men he had once been filled with HOPE, but life had slowly beat it out of him. Cynical of his fellow man and cut off from society there on the island. He did not like to fish. His bike tires were flat. And dishes filled the sink. As such he wasn't in a hurry to get back to his hytta. But he didn't really want to linger among the vapidity of the shops either. Hours of that would be just as bad.
The library. It was then he remembered the library nearby might have some books that wouldn't be such a task to read. Something, perhaps, he could fall into. Books where one of the few escapes left to the old man. The library only held two shelves in his tongue, but one book would be enough for a couple hours. If they weren't all books about vampires, love stories, and other such pablum. This he could also not abide. He climbed the stairs and came to the door. And went in.
Years before the old man had run with his friend. They'd run through the forests of Tennessee. In the sweltering heat. In the snow. In the mud and the rain and everything else. Those hours spent together were rarely silent. A multitude of subjects they'd spoken on. Trying to make sense of politics and business and women. And then the old man had left across the ocean and his friend the other way across the continent to Seattle. There on the shelf in the library was the book his friend recommended: The Old Man and the Sea. He never liked Hemingway and never intended to read it. And yet here was staring at him from the shelf among the trite works so popular with the masses. The old man picked it up and checked it out.
A book needs a place to read though. And the benches had been removed to avoid people sitting near eachother on them. He walked by a sushi place and noticed it had just opened. The old man entered, sprayed his hands with disinfectant as demanded, and began to read. The story started well enough, but unfortunately they did not have miso soup. Or soup of any kind for that matter. So sushi it was. And did they have a beer? Yes. But only Corona. He and the waitress both laughed at the irony.
Sitting there reading the crafted prose and sipping the cerveza the old man felt transported to the warmth of an island on the other side of the ocean in the southern sea warm and bathed in sun. And, for some hours, he escaped his cold little island in the north. The tale made the man feel it was okay to be old. And that the struggle to endure the years remaining, alone or among others, futile or successful, short or fleeting, was enough.