Acorns left from the fall crunched in the black leaves in the dampness under our feet. A bench lured us with its emptiness and the old man and I wandered over to sit wordlessly beside the muddy swirls of the river. The silence was awkward.
“So what do you think about the presidential race?” I asked.
Someone had to say something. He left it to me.
“Seems we are at a defining moment with a female candidate, an African American candidate and a Republican that half of the Republicans hate.”
“I’m tired of my own politics, so I couldn’t give a damn less about yours,” he said and made it sound less angry than the words imply.
“I didn’t actually mention mine,” I said.
“Don’t.” he said.
“Who was president when you were born?” I asked.
“Still sounds like politics to me,” he said, turning his head into the dappled sun to catch some warmth. “It’s all about greed. Greed or money, power, whatever.”
“No, just trying to get a bearing on –“
“How old I am?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Coolidge. Calvin Coolidge,” he said. “Lawyer from Vermont. Wanted to reduce government. Reagan liked the man. I was too young to know the difference. I remember FDR more. My daddy liked him. My mother didn’t. Truman was my man.”
He stopped as if he was about to say something and then said it.
“Did Reagan reduce the size of government?”
I knew it was a question he already had an answer for so I smiled and watched clouds form the shape of a horse above the trees across the water. We didn’t talk for several minutes. He squinted at the cloud as well.
“Let’s suppose you live another 30 years,” he said, turning ponderously to look me in the face for the first time in our talk. “You will be about my age then.”
He paused. I waited for him to finish. There seemed to be more answers in his silence than his words.
“What do you think the world will be like then?” he said.
“I can’t imagine,” I said and looked down at his scuffed shoes, likely bought back in the 1950’s and re-soled several times from the appearance.
“Will we have cured cancer?” he asked. “Or heart disease? Will we be in a war against somebody else we hate? Will we be able to afford college, medicine, a home?”
“I hope so,” I said. “I mean, I hope we will have progressed from now.”
“Hope is a funny thing,” he said. “It’s just a wish.”
He turned back to the cloud, which had shifted to be more of a mutant horse with two heads. Children laughed in the distance and a large brown dog barked in robotic cadence to their laughter. A mother yelled for them to be careful. The old man cut his eyes toward the children and the hard creases in his face seemed to soften.
“How about them?” he asked. “What kind of place will we leave them?”
“It really doesn’t look too good,” I said as the kids threw a tennis ball and the dog chased it across the yellow grass of March.
“It looks just like it did when Coolidge was president,” he said and bored his green eyes into mine with a look of total conviction. “People just don’t change very fast.”
More silence.
“We can have black and brown and red dogs and hate black, brown, and red people,” he said. “Don’t make any sense to me. There’s always a reason to hate. Complain about the cost of schools and applaud the building of more prisons.”
“One in every hundred Americans is in jail,” I said, remembering a recent headline. “One in every fifteen African Americans is in jail.”
“Should be one in every fifteen politicians,” he chuckled. “We have too many laws. What will government do when we’re all in jail for some reason or another? Who will pay the taxes and buy the goods? Who will work when everyone is in jail?”
He looked saddened by this thought. And it was followed by more silence.
“How about the environment?” I finally asked.
“Just like politics,” he said. “If we could get greedy people out of it, we just might have a chance. Unless we’re all in jail.”
I nodded. He grabbed the bench firmly and stood, taking a deep breath.
“When was the last time you went fishing?” he asked.
“I was about fourteen,” I said.
“I’m going right now,” he said, and held out his hand to shake mine.
“You can’t fish here,” I said. “There are signs.”
“See you in jail,” he said.