Wisdom according to an old man
I always see him tilling the soil or plucking the weeds off the lawn. He coughs harshly without covering his mouth then looks at me and smiles, some teeth still remaining. He wears thick glasses.
Besides coughing, he does not seem to make much noise.
Once during a hot afternoon, he goes around asking for help to assemble a mobile phone sent by his son in the city and falls down hurting himself. The heat was too much, he recalls later. A couple of men carry him to his home and assemble the phone. They play through all the ringtones for him to choose. Any sound will do, he says, just as long as I know someone’s calling. Pa, they tell him, this even has camera. The hell with camera, he growls, who puts camera into a phone?
I see him again today, plucking off weeds from the hard lawn as usual. I go towards him; he looks up at me from the glasses and smiles.
Strong old man! I try to praise him.
Smiles
You embarrass the young men, I tell him, aren’t you even tired?
He coughs dryly, breathes laboriously and smiles. He takes out tobacco from a pouch and rolls them into a paper. Tucking his glasses on the collar, he wipes sweat from his face with a large handkerchief.
We talk of his past, my past, the future and current affairs. We even talk of girls and sex and HIV and AIDS. We talk of diseases and bird flu and swine flu and flu A and flu Mexico and flu America and sars.
Every time he talks, he spits out tobacco leaves, puffing out volume of smoke from his mouth and nostrils and squint his eyes so narrow that I wonder if he saw anything.
He laughs when we talk of philosophy.
Philosophy? He laughs, it’s nothing but foolish vents of a fool! He lives a life so imperfect that he sees perfection in his ideals. Sorry but I will talk nothing more about philosophy. So saying, he throws away the cigarette butt into the bush, almost angrily.
Then what about wisdom? I ask.
Wisdom? He laughs again. Well, wisdom is nothing but an empty bag.
Before I ask him what he means, he waves his arm in the air and walks away.
