Now I Can Imagine It's The Olden Days
By: Mathias Nelson
I was working in a department store, doing banal tasks, when an old man began dubiously walking to and fro through the toy department. A large hump swelled from his back and kept him bent. He walked as if under the sea, pushing invisible fish aside with one curled hand; left foot planting, then right foot languidly uprooting, he gulped air and let it out in long puffs. I abandoned a fat woman that had been trying on shoes for the last half hour (every pair cut her circulation), and went to help the old man.
"I'm just . . . waltzing around," he said between heavy breaths with a cringed smile. I started to turn away, when he gave my sleeve a quick tug. "My mother used to take me to the store when I was little. Used to buy me toys."
"Oh yea?" I said. "Fond memories, eh?" I took him for lonely, one of the many dying that roamed around looking for a stranger's ear, and felt a wave of pity.
"Damn fond," he said, pursed his lips in thought. "Good damn fond. That's why I'm here. All my friends and family have passed on to Who. I come down to get a piece of childhood back, that breezy feelin'."
"I find myself doing that now and then," I plucked a GI-Joe off a rack, "looking at these toys and reminiscing."
"Well," the old man coughed and sucked phlegm back down his throat, "I can't find any toys from when I was little. Do you have any tiny plastic soldiers?"
We began a turtle pace to the aisle. I was tempted to steady him, but didn't want to offend.
"Ah yes!" he chuckled. "Here they are. Here!" he looked up at me with wet, gray eyes of nostalgia. "I'll be damned. Look at these little shits, just like they use to make 'em!"
I nodded, started to feel awkward not being able to share his child-like excitement.
"Best friend died yesterday," he said gravely with a frown, the many wrinkles of his face shifting and combining. "Kidney failure. Was in the war with me. Now I can imagine it's the olden days, and we're killing gooks. Good times." He brought the clear bag of toy soldiers to his face, searched it with a shake. "There!" he pointed and shoved the bag at me. "There's Bill!" A plastic soldier, featureless but for mouth and eye indents, aimed a bazooka at me. "Blowing up Vietcong! Say— boy, you ever seen a woman's detached hip lips? I carried the machete . . ."
Speechless, I stood gaping at his genuine glee while managers droned on with sale announcements over the intercom. I walked away, disgusted.
"Hey—where you goin'?" he yelled and his voice croaked into a screech. "I feel young again!"
I took a fifteen minute break, and as if the day wasn't already fucked, I ended up sitting across the room from a modest Asian coworker, watching her lips as she ground a veggie-burger with small bites. She licked the ketchup from the corner of her mouth and with a grin asked how I was doing, to which I replied—"Sick."
After break I went to the parking lot to gather stray shopping carts, lit a cigarette and leaned on a cart, letting the warm afternoon sooth me, when the old man came out of the store, ambling as best he could, cackling and holding the bazooka soldier in front of the bright sun so that it was a miniature silhouette of his malicious friend. I clutched the cart, watched him move across the lot without even looking for cars, until it finally slid from my tired sweaty grip and rolled down hill toward a convertible. I didn't care to stop it. The collision resonated along my spine, and with a flinch, and the uproar of the owner's rage over the small dent in his vehicle, for the first time I felt myself being pulled into the downward spiral of age, truly weary of the world.
Mathias Nelson is a Pushcart nominated writer living in the cold of Wisconsin. For contact information and publication updates, please visit www.nyqpoets.net/poet/mathiasnelson
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