- Joined
- Mar 18, 2016
- Messages
- 38
"I'd go back if they called me," Jess said at the age of ninety-seven. " I wouldn't be much good at this age, but I'd fight again, sho 'nough." Jess bit the tip off his Marsh Wheeling and spit it into the Rose bushes as I, just twenty-nine, cut mine off with my pocket knife. The world seemed to stop when the old man offered me his Zippo. Every time I
flipped that lighter open another story began, another wish pondered, another regret lingered off Jess' lips. We sat on the back patio of an assisted living home swapping stories of which I could conjure none that compared to his. The old man gleaned from WWII tales, "All us boys were turned into men overnight," he said. "This guy I knew...Lord...had a woman in Japan and his wife in the States. Fella mixed up the letters to each of 'em, sent them each to the wrong women. His wife divorced his ass right quick," he laughed. All those times he gave me, all those cigars, all that life and all I did was fix his leaking toilet.
flipped that lighter open another story began, another wish pondered, another regret lingered off Jess' lips. We sat on the back patio of an assisted living home swapping stories of which I could conjure none that compared to his. The old man gleaned from WWII tales, "All us boys were turned into men overnight," he said. "This guy I knew...Lord...had a woman in Japan and his wife in the States. Fella mixed up the letters to each of 'em, sent them each to the wrong women. His wife divorced his ass right quick," he laughed. All those times he gave me, all those cigars, all that life and all I did was fix his leaking toilet.
