The old man and the wall

“When one has the opportunity to do what one wishes, one not only should do so, but one has to.”

I love the elderly. That is to say I have formed many bonds with those of an elderly nature throughout my life.

Perhaps it is an old age that lurks within my own soul that draws me, or a fascination with the perspectives that come with age; or perhaps I am simply fascinated by the era of their youth, the things that they deem to be of interest and of taboo.

Either way, on my journey to twenty-seven, the end of which now lingers just a month away, I have come to know many old souls, both within and outside of my family.

There is one that I recall with a particular fondness. A man by the name of John Eagles, whom I lived opposite as a boy. He had lived an extraordinary life, all of which had occurred before I knew him, as a sweet-natured and affable widower. He died in my early teens, but not before I had lunched with him on several occasions, and helped him around the house on several more.

He had been a flying ace, a lower-league footballer, a painter and a mason; all within the confines of a life that I had only witnessed as being one of provincial comfort. He watered his plants, washed his car, greeted the neighbours, and petted dogs and cats as they came and went. Yet, over lunch, he’d tell me stories of the Ruhr and Roots Hall, loves and losses and the right composition for sunflowers to bloom. His front garden was covered in them from July through to August.

John left my mind quickly once he had died. And I sometimes lament myself for this, yet I was thirteen, and emotions are a slippery thing to handle in those years. He left my mind, and only returned on occasion.

Such as it was that he did indeed return quite recently when I, having moved from one part of my town to another, found myself on a new commute entirely. On my newfound travels, I came across a man, not unlike John, though significantly younger, doing something that I don’t think I’d ever seen an old man do before. He sat, in the English summer sun, applying cement to bricks, and wedding them together. One became two, three became four, and so on. And each day, as I walked home, there were more bricks assembled, and he stood guard over them; gradually shepherding them into position.

“What are you building?”, I asked on the third day.

“Wall.”

That was it for a few weeks, his answer was curt, yet protruded no rudeness, or disdain for myself or my sort. He was building a wall, and had answered my question truthfully, and with an austere economy of words.

“Still a wall,” he said, catching me the next day eyeing up his progress. By now there were twenty bricks, and I had deduced an average pace of five a day.

“Would you like a hand?”, I asked several days later.

“No, doing it all by myself.”

“Why?”

“Wife said I couldn’t.”

And so I kept my distance, and let the man do what he had to do. I understood his reasoning, and respected it to no end. And two weeks passed in that manner, as he gradually warmed to me, though this reached plateau at a mutual nod upon sight of each other. The wall grew, slowly, into fruition.

In defiance of expectation, he rose each day, placed his five bricks, and waited to do it again. He was there each afternoon like clockwork. I grew concerned when I didn’t find him there on a Thursday, and sighed in relief when I did on Friday. I didn’t walk that way over the weekend, and would find him entering my mind at the strangest of hours. I simply wanted to know how his wall was coming along.

And then, on a Monday, some four weeks after I had first observed that funny old man, his work was done. We sat, on a migrated deck chair, and marvelled lovingly at his work; the fruits of his gradual labour. He had a beer in hand, and smiled contently at a finished wall. I did not think to linger, and if he’d offered me a beer and a seat I’d have refused, for it was his achievement, not mine. I had simply been a witness.

It was then that John returned to me, and I recalled something that he had told me many years prior. For the sake of brevity, my creative impulses, and the fact that this was almost fourteen years ago, I shall paraphrase what he told me over tea one day. In words of a similar effect, he gave me the following words of advice:

“Life,” he said, “is full of things that we do not wish to do. Most of us do not enjoy the work we do, the schools we attend, the people we see on a daily basis, the direction of the society we are in. We may not like the music on the radio, the shows on television, or the politicians in office. It is therefore imperative that one makes as many decisions as possible. When one has the opportunity to do what one wishes, one not only should do so, but one has to.”

At the time, I took his words to be a granting of permission. Permission to eat endless streams of chocolate, play video games long into the night, and avoid homework. This, foolish as it is, was the inevitable disconnect between a boy, on the cusp of life, and a man at the end of it.

He was, of course, not instructing me to feed my most base instincts and appetites to no end. Rather, he was imploring me to find joy through self-ownership. To take a life of little control, in which we all feel as mere passengers do, and to inject as much free will, artistic brilliance, and simple, earned, euphoria into it as possible. And the older I grow, the more his words live within me.

As I have elected to walk the direst of paths, that of an artist in the post-art age, with obstacles and branches at every turn; that take the form of dead-end jobs and the thousand-yard stares of peers who cannot comprehend such a decision, financial pressures, constant self-critique and self-lambast, I find strength in those words. Perhaps, some day, I too shall build a wall in the sunshine, and drink a beer upon its completion.