xnedski
Dad
“This will be me some day.”
I said that when I showed this photograph to a friend, who responded “How do you feel about that?” And I thought—but didn’t say—’What a stupid fucking question. People get old; it’s what happens. What does it matter how I feel about it?’
“Growing old is like the coming of winter,” my friend said. But no, it’s not. In winter you can stay inside. In winter you can go South, where it’s warm. In winter you know spring will come. Ain’t no spring gonna come after you get old, no matter what your feelings are about it.
Look at this man. I suspect, given a choice, he’d rather be young. But he doesn’t have a choice; his body isn’t young and it’ll never be young again. He doesn’t seem terribly troubled by that. It doesn’t matter how you feel about being old; it matters how you do being old.
My sense is this guy does it pretty well. My sense is he does it with as much grace and humor as is possible. My sense is he doesn’t make a fuss about it. Some day this will be me. I don’t have any particular feelings about that one way or another. It’s going to happen. When it does, I hope to do it as well as this man is doing it.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
