Old Men Walking

Every morning there was a parade across town.  This parade had no floats, no marching bands, no banners, no cheerleaders, no clowns tossing candy from miniature cars. 

The parade was of old men walking.  

Sometimes the old men walked alone, other times they marched in twos and threes.  You could see them gesturing with their hands or laughing at something one of them said.  Unhurried they walked along the side of the roads (there were no sidewalks) from the west part of the town east past Nickel’s Pay Less and back again. 

These old men were not the wizened dignified white-haired elders of works of fiction. Farmersville wasn’t Mayberry. There were some rough characters in my hometown, and these old men were roughhewn.  They lacked any polished edges.  Seemingly indestructible, they were like aged, gnarled wood furniture. They didn’t look frail; they didn’t look vulnerable.  

There were splinters in those old men. 

They had stubbled cheeks, wore dirty overalls, worn work boots, faded gray work shirts with frayed collars.  They didn’t always bathe, and it was noticeable the closer they stood.  Their chins were often flecked with brown dried spots, residue of spitting out streams of snuff and chewing tobacco.  Their teeth weren’t just yellowed, they were dark, stained a kind of brownish green.  There were gaps from lost teeth here and there, and occasionally you heard the click of false teeth.  None of the old men were fat.  Not exactly skinny, one would have to say stringy, their coveralls hanging loose from a bony skeleton. 

The old men put store in the walking; it kept them moving; it kept them alive.  These old men didn’t sit in rocking chairs.  This wasn’t a Disney movie.  If they even had a rocking chair it wasn’t fit for sitting.  Most likely it was broken down, coming apart, the straw and matting torn and pulled.  

The walks provided what passed for a social life for the old men.  The passed, along the route, the homes of families they had known many decades.  They’d stop to talk and share an observation or maybe give a wave to an acquaintance busy changing a tire on an old car or hoisting the engine from an old wreck pulled up next to the house.  

The walks gave the old men something to look at. Like sentinels to our lives, they saw it all. 

Their walks led them through the life of the town, through the lives of people they knew.  They saw and heard the vitality of the town, the conflicts, the successes, the failures.  They noted any little change in a house’s old wooden porch, or what clothes were hanging from a clothesline at the other house across the street.  Once in a while they got a prize.  Like sighting a young Mrs. walking out the side door of her clapboard house to speak to her husband bent over the engine of his car and her not having finished buttoning her blouse. Such sights brought a crooked smile to the old faces, but not half as much as coming across some blowhard giving his neighbor a good cussing for some imagined transgression. 

They laughed hearty and often, especially at some absurdity they observed on their daily walks across town. At the self-righteous bombast of a preacher at a revival meeting, the just turned sixteen teenager driving his mother’s car with the windows rolled down and the radio turned up, maybe at a dog soiling the ground near the entry way of Mrs. Beavers grocery store, right after she had swept it cleaned.   

If you had a little patience (then, as now, a rare characteristic among young boys) you might hear them relate tales from Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas about your family and the families you knew, the same folks who had migrated away from the economic devastation visited on those states during The Great Depression.  The old men could talk of the history of our people, the history that existed before The Dustbowl, before The Depression, before the Migration west.  Not some homogenized history, but a history of how life was lived back then, back there. They could talk of the music, the dances, the ball games, the church meetings; they sometimes spoke of tragedies for sure, but they could also relate the good times, the good times a poor people will find, must find, even in the midst of suffering.

During my teen years, from age eleven until I entered military service, I worked at various jobs at Nickel’s Pay Less, a grocery store in the middle of town and along the route the old men frequented.  

Working my job, often carrying groceries out to customer’s cars, the appearance of the old men moving along the road outside the market was as regular as the sun coming up. It was expected. It meant everything was all right; everything was as it should be.  

If business was slow, I would pause and talk to them.  I enjoyed what they said, how they said it.  And if you listened closely, you might learn something.  “You’re one of Art Cline’s boys, aren’t you,” one would say.  And there would be a knowing smile on his face making you think he was remembering things in Arkansas I probably should never know.  Might not want to know. But he would tell me anyway.

I liked seeing the old men walking.

That is until this old man or that one, on a particular day was missing and then never came anymore. 

I was a teenager and though I knew better, I couldn’t help but feel everything, and everybody lived forever. The sudden absence of one of the old men, the empty space in the parade, brought home to me as much as anything that such feelings were an illusion, would always be an illusion.  

When this old man or that one; when one of the regulars never showed up anymore, it was an ending, a lost suitcase of memories, the burial of a fund of stories about our history. It was Time’s erosion of an oral tradition, an intimate history of a people that stretched over a half century, and across half a continent.  

And once gone, even at that age, I knew it could never be recovered.

It made me sad.  

Still does.

The photograph is of my Father (the young boy in the front row on the left resting on his knees with his hands in his pockets), his siblings and his mother’s extended family. It was taken in a time before the Dust Bowl, before the Great Depression and the resulting Diaspora, a time still alive in the memories of the Old Men Walking. 

Farmersville Tales is published every Sunday.  For other writings by Phil Cline, visit philcline.com