Time-Out With the Old-Timers

It hits me at random moments: I am not okay. I especially feel it in the middle of the night, when I bolt awake and cannot find the familiar sense of my own being. I am uncontained and undefined, tremulous and small.

Sometimes I live inside a poem, taking a time-out from following every new outrage in the shit show, putting music in my ears, and marveling at the flamboyant, evanescent spectacle of life. Yesterday I saw a guy in the middle of Solvang cruising along on a skateboard playing a guitar. I walked the path behind the Mission and along the olive grove, and the air smelled like horses and eucalyptus. A life-sized doll in a box in the thrift store brought back a childhood memory. The river was a mirror, holding rippled reflections of yellow grass and sycamore trees. But I was not okay.

Today, I decided to accept an invitation to lunch with the Lompoc Old-Timers. It was a beautiful drive…hills washed in sunlight, plump white cinematic clouds…and I found my way to the restaurant located in a broad parking lot near a Walmart and various other stores and businesses, a few of which were boarded up and empty. I resisted the impulse to go back home, and I bravely entered the restaurant, where I immediately saw my friend Ron, 90-something years old, ordering an Irish coffee and showing other old-timers to the table.

These are people with deep roots in the area and long friendships with each other. There was Dr. Jamison, at 97, the eldest of the group, who retired from his obstetrical practice at the age of 95 after assisting with one last C-section. There was Donna Chandler, a professional violinist and one-time reporter, and Esther Sloan, who, with her late husband Jim, spent fifty years farming and raising cattle on a 2,000 acre ranch. (“She worked with AI,” someone said. “Artificial insemination.” ) There was a lovely lady named Alice and my friend Karen from the historical society and many others that I wish I’d had a chance to talk to. But what amazed me was the wonderful bond of friendship and history these people shared, the communal ease at the table. “We voted about voting once,” Ron told me, “and we made a rule not to vote on things.”

But there are understandings. “We don’t talk politics.,” he said. “And we don’t stand up and brag about what we’re doing. And we don’t ‘socialize’ – what we do is ‘mingle’. Yes, we get together once a month and mingle.”

I like the mingle mode. It’s more relaxed, kind of a casual being there and blending, less pressured and performative than socializing.

“You’re our newest member now,” he added, handing me a pen.

Ron is a ribbon-winning grower of roses, and he has been at it for at least seventy years. After lunch, he invited me to follow him back to his house, a slight detour, to see his rose garden.

And who could have predicted how much these roses would lift my soul? The place was a rose extravaganza, a fiesta of fragrance and color. Roses lined the walls and walkway of his tidy little house, brightly in bloom and quivering in the breeze.

“This is my favorite,” he said, pausing at a bush of luxuriant white roses, “Pope John.”

Oh, the fragrance of them! It seemed the perfect perfume of rose.

There was also Julia Child, and Rainbow’s End, and Veteran’s Honor, that he had planted for his neighbor, a veteran. There were mauve, pink, and yellow ones whose names I don’t remember, and one that was the reddest red I have ever seen. The secret may be in the compost tea he puts into the soil, or the patience to explore the micro changes that affect them and a willingness to pull out the ones that don’t do well.

Or maybe it’s just a matter of attentiveness and care, the tending of something with love and pride by a kind and gentle soul.

I watched my white haired friend walk slowly up the walkway beneath a curved brick archway that he built himself when he was young. There was an antique Lompoc streetlamp with beautiful frosted glass that he had found years earlier, and a skinny palm tree was etched against a very blue sky. I hugged him good-bye and headed home.

I passed an old church and railroad tracks and a line of great shadowy hills. I turned the radio on and quickly off. I remembered that quiet is a corridor to elsewhere, and that I am sturdier than I think, a fledgling old-timer, as a matter of fact.

I felt okay.