I grow old, I grow old, I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled


Age is lovely. The story in the handfuls of passed decades, the wholeness of life almost ripely lived. I want to know everything about them. Yet even this dignity has it has its brinks. I am visiting my grandmother in her nursing home. It's goodbye, I think. It's always goodbye, though. Here is this place where people can't get up anymore, who aren't anymore. The room should have been steeped with knowing but this woman was crying, "It's terrible to be old and helpless" as if we didn't realize. Her venom was forgot as she was changed, clean, and blank again.

It's as though they ceased to age but rather every moment did, strong for several seconds, then unwound, lost and tremblingly resuscitated: the cocoon of focus birthed dying and withered so closely knit the joy of being drowned in the forgetfulness and frustration that vitaliy is spent in the detached, unreachable past

I sat by one woman and her conversation ran in tight, two circle sentences, released and wrapped--"I'm from Lufkin, do you know where that is?" Yes, we did, because that's where we were. That and "hurry up and wait". A visitor indulged her and they all began laughing, the tremor of a cocked syringe, "hurry up and wait" she kept forgetting she had said it and instead of a roasted, full-bodied smell of what they were it was Lysol--fiber-enriched, picture only book, infomercial, artificial flower Lysol, "hurry up and wait" Lysol, lemon fresh Lysol.