Attribution: ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, assists the keeper in passing along Ogden Nash’s:
Old Men
“People expect old men to die,
“They do not really mourn old men.
“Old men are different. People look
“At them with eyes that wonder when…
“People watch with unshocked eyes;
“But the old men know when an old man dies.
So the keeper “knows” of Sam and Bernie and Jerry and Dan and John and Bob and Rob and Darold and so many more; and he remembers them all with great fondness and like the dwindling number of his old men friends still alive, he is not yet ready for what “people expect” and neither he nor his old friends plan to “go quietly into that good night.”
The keeper would fault Ogden for being so gender specific. Old women “know” too.
Photo by Bill Stokes