The purpose of old men

There is a flock of old men who congregate every morning at the corner of Via Roma and Via Principe Umberto. They appear sometime before we have managed to get out and about, coming from who-knows-where with their canes and their old-guy hats. They gather like barnacles on the benches in front of the bakery, sometimes chatting with each other, sometimes silent, but always facing toward the main street to watch life go by. After a full morning, they disperse during the afternoon “siesta” period, when all of the shops close for three hours, and reappear faithfully on the other side of the street to catch the afternoon sun. When we first arrived, they would fall silent and stare unabashedly as we walked past, though I did manage to extract a round of startled “Sera’s” from them one afternoon when I walked by and called out “Buonasera!”

The old men appear to take their occupation very seriously—I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they are more reliable than the church clock that gongs every quarter hour. They show up even when it is cloudy and the temperature is in the single digits. And there are never any women. Where are the old ladies? Are they all at home? Are they dead? Do they have a different gathering place that I’ve not yet discovered? I am becoming obsessed with the idea of walking casually up to the corner one morning and sitting down beside the old men like it was the most normal thing in the world. What would they do? Would the town reel into chaos with such a disruption at its hub?

In North America, our old people don’t gather in this way, even in the summer time. They stay at home, isolated, often passing time by watching hours of television. How can that be progress? I wish our neighbourhoods had places for people to gather. I can picture my own dad among those old men on Via Roma. I think he’d like it.

This is a town of 3800 people: small enough to walk around in an hour, but large enough to have quite a variety of little shops, one of each: a hardware store, a shoe store, a store that bafflingly sells fancy dinnerware, a sewing store, a furniture store, a bookstore. When I wander into the latter, the tiny old lady behind the counter asks me loudly if she can help me. By now, I’ve remembered how to say that I am just looking. She reminds me a little of my paternal grandmother: she is spry and bright-eyed, and wears her hair in the same style, pinned away from her face at one side. She seems kind and earnest, and is missing some front teeth. I already know that I will buy something from her, even if only a pen. She helpfully suggests a pocket dictionary—it’s obvious I need a lot of work on my Italian—but I gesture apologetically to my phone, on which I have both an Italian/English dictionary app as well as Google Translate at my fingertips. It must be a hard go these days for this woman, who just wants to make a living selling envelopes for letters no one writes anymore, and dictionaries to people who all have smart phones. I feel more than a little regret about this present reality; I love bookstores and I don’t want them to die. I renew my efforts to find something, and eventually I do: a small, seemingly manageable volume about an Italian man’s travels in Nepal. I am drawn to the cover of another book, but I don’t understand the title, so I try to look it up on my phone. No network connection! Maybe the old lady is right about her pocket dictionary after all.

When I take the book to the counter, the old lady tells me, loudly, that if I don’t know some of the words in the book, I can come back and she will help me. And she beams up at me with her toothless smile.

This is the kind of interaction that I love so much about the slow type of travel we do. We seem to end up in sleepy little towns during the off-season for tourism, and we stay for way longer than any of the townsfolk think is normal. They may stare at us in confusion or curiosity, but they’re in no hurry; there’s nothing much going on. They seem to want to chat with us, to ask where we are from and why we are here, even to test our grip-strength when they hear we are climbers. They have patience with the way I stumble about in their language, trampling shamelessly on noun genders and verb conjugations. The interactions are all so very simple and basic, but they feel more genuine than queuing up with a hundred other tourists to see an attraction.

Photo by Karla Hopp