Letter to the Editor

17 Oct, 2022

The old man

The old man at the cash machine in Wood Street – you don’t know him, but he has a life well lived. He once sang solo in a packed Auckland town hall, he designed and built a yacht and several houses, restored vintage cars. He travelled the world made friends everywhere and learned languages. He has three children, all better than most, because he gave them time.

The old man is nostalgic for past times when folk stood for ‘God Save the Queen’ out of respect, when no one worked on a Sunday as it was a day of rest, where ‘bob a job’ existed because there were no media devices. When he was young, his mother told him, stay away from people with tattoos they are either rough sailors or have been in jail.

Some people today are amused by flash mobs, but in his time people just sang anyway, long before boom boxes. Some people these days want to get rid of cows because they flatulate too much methane into the atmosphere, but they themselves pollute it with vaping and smoking anyway. Many of these people don’t realise that cow’s milk solids is what makes the butter they use and the steers the meat in their hamburgers.

The old man will die disillusioned, worried for the new generations who think that they can solve the world from extinction by global warming, they buy electric cars built of more plastic than in a supermarket and which will cause huge disposal problems in the future. Generally there are so many self-serving selfish people who care little for the standards of the past and want to reinvent things, that men have died for, and that have served for generations, just to put more money in their pockets for now.

The old man sits on the bench outside the pharmacy, a very big V8 ute rumbles by, radio blaring some hip bop. He can name almost every make of car ever made, wonders if the tradie in the V8 can even name five. The local Harley Davidson with little in the way of a muffler adds it’s racket to the V8. He thinks, he bets, he’s sure they will never own a mortgage-free home like his. So he laughs to himself and walks on home.

Bevan Lawrence

Mangawhai