Beautiful young things still come to our door by mistake almost daily. Well, two or three times a week. Our street is a beautiful young thing magnet. They come up the steps looking at their iPhones, confused, peer in through the front window and see me. Now there’s a sight. Bravely they knock on the door. Sometimes they ask for so and so in a hip New Yawkese. Sometimes they have tiny little English accents. This one the latter, cute but très hip. As always I was very polite, if unshaven. I smile. Upstairs, I suggest. She thanked me and took delicate, teetering high heeled steps back down, and I watch and wonder how one gets so old. Twenty five years in one pad. How many cats back was that? How many jobs? Bands? We moved in scarcely older than she. I would jump the two flights of stairs two and three at a time. I moved the furniture in myself. The boxes of books and records. Now I hobble up and down, arthritic, from jumping all those stairs, perhaps, or maybe falling down them, and I watch too much TV. Grown men, Canadians mostly, are brawling, and young things come up the steps like poetry.
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Brick Wahl 