Day 5: The Old Man

At ninety-five, it wasn't difficult to start ignoring people's advice:

Take the stairs!  It will keep your heart strong!

Watch the red meat and keep an eye on your blood pressure and cholesterol!

Do the crossword or Soduku daily, to keep your brain active!

No wine at your age!

And so, Irving ate out every night, drank whatever he wanted, took the stairs and indulged in naps over Soduku, Jeopardy! instead of the crossword.  At a younger age, he had worried what would happen if things started to atrophy, and he was sure that they had, but he had survived, though some days that was regretable.  In any case, he was past that, past the worry a younger man has about vulnerability. 

Each night was not a different place.  He had his favorites:  Firefox for steak, Pesce for, you guessed it -- fish.  But some nights, he tried a new place, something he had read about in the paper, or a place his daughter mentioned, when she probably also mentioned he was spending an awful lot of money eating this way.  It's true, he was.  But that was just fine with Irving.  Everybody had gone to college by now, even Joel, the grandson he thought would never make a cent.  Even Joel had got an education.  Video games, doing something with illustrations, or animation more likely, Irving realized.  In any case, no one needed help with those things anymore.  Eating his dinner wherever he wanted seemed like a perfectly good way to spend some money.

That night he was going to a new restaurant.  It had just opened the previous month, in a neighborhood that had certainly changed since Irving was a boy.  Mostly, it seemed populated with young people, no children to be seen anywhere and probably no one his age, to be sure.  But, why not.  Irving decided, why not. 

Moving carefully, with most of his weight on the right foot, he made his way to the back of his apartment, past the crocheted framed messages his wife had made at their second house.  Bible verses, mostly.  Corinthians.  But also Yeats, his favorite, and an attempt by his wife to honor his life's work in her own way.  Irving regretted not being able to read very well anymore and, for perhaps the first time in 50 years, was very glad for these lines to be writ large in the crossstitch:  "She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree / But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree."  Still, Mary was fighting with him, armed with poetry.  Ah!  She was having the last laugh, he thought.  She did have a good sense of humor.

Irving paced himself down the stretch of hallway, remembering that Mary thought he looked best in a blue shirt, which is what he would wear.