The Spectator Bird Read Free Page A

to worry yourself into a wheel chair.”
    â€œI’m not worrying.”
    Wheezy and loud, his voice rode over mine. We stood in the green angle of the roadways, with the creek rustling in its deep channel, as if we were engaged in a quarrel that we didn’t quite want to make plain. “Diseases don’t live up to their full potential any oftener than people do,” he said. “You’ve got at most one chance in five it will really cripple you. You get plenty of exercise?”
    â€œWe walk, I work in the yard.”
    â€œGood. You’re in good shape. You’ll make it into the eighties.”
    â€œWhy, thanks, Doctor,” I said. “I appreciate the offer.”
    That old reptilian eye again, a snort through the long nose. “You know what you’ve got? You’ve got a bad case of the sixties. The sixties are the age of anxiety. You feel yourself on the brink of old age, and you fret. Once you pass your seventieth birthday that all clears away. You’re like a man with an old car and no place in particular to go. You drive it where you want to, and every day it keeps on running is a gift. If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with a sensible diet and regular exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever. Strictly speaking, there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as old age. You can keep chicken tissues alive indefinitely in a nutrient broth.”
    â€œYou know, it’s a funny thing,” I said, “I never had the slightest desire to live in a nutrient broth.”
    I exasperated him. “You’re bored with your garden. If I’d been there when God set Adam and Eve in that perfect place I’d have given them about four months. They’d have lasted longer in Las Vegas. Who do you see? Who are your friends, besides the ones I know?”
    â€œHave you been talking to Ruth?”
    â€œNo. Should I?”
    â€œNo. But she has this notion you do, that I need more people around. I never have needed many people around. I always had more than I wanted. A few friends are enough. There are lots of perfectly pleasant people whom I like, but if I don’t see them I don’t miss them. What kept me in New York was work, not people. When the work ended, most of the people ended, all but the handful that meant something. Maybe that’s alarming, but that’s the way I am.”
    â€œAll right,” Ben said. “Some are. You don’t have to start going to Arthur Murray. But I’m not kidding, old age is too God damned often self-inflicted. You don’t want to turn into a hermit saving string and bottle tops and running the neighbor kids out of your yard. Come out more. Come to lunch with me.”
    â€œSure, any time.”
    â€œI’ll call you. And for God’s sake don’t go thinking yourself into any God damned wheel chair!” He reversed his cane and thumped me for emphasis on the breastbone and almost knocked me down.
    â€œWhat the hell is that, a shillelagh?”
    â€œHaven’t I shown you that?” He held it up. To the shaft, which looked like cherry wood, had been fastened this big bone, obviously the ball of the ball and socket joint of some large animal. The knob was the size of a handball, with a frill of bone around its base and a two-inch shank of bone projecting from that and bound to the wood with a wide silver band. As the finial of the polished, elegant stick of wood the handle was grotesque, the sort of thing any self-respecting dog would bury and never go back to.
    â€œThat’s my hip joint,” Ben said. “When I broke my hip, and they had me in the operating room, the last thing I said to the surgeon was, ‘Doctor, save me that joint, I want it’ I’d walked on it for seventy-nine years and I damn well wanted to go on walking on it”
    By then I was laughing and holding my