Bernie and the Old Man

Sometimes real life is just too much for good story material. I’ll try anyway. Dedicated to the ones who didn’t make it to the finish line. We carry you with us.

When Bernie sees me, he starts running toward me. Without a trained eye, you couldn’t tell it apart from walking. Actually, you couldn’t even tell he’s moving forward at all, if you didn’t know him. He’s wobbling, wobbling from side to side, taking swings to get those stiff old legs going, using his sausage-shaped body for creating momentum.

Bernie looks like straight out of a kid’s drawing. A kid with rather modest talent, that is, who drew a fat sheep with very short legs.

I increase my speed because as funny as this wobbling looks, it doesn’t seem too comfortable. A wavering ship that risks tipping over, sinking. A few moments later Bernie’s human raises his cane and waves at me, tripping. Now I’m worrying about both.

This happens almost every day.

Did you ever sit at a pond, observing a dragonfly? How it scans the place in what looks like an algorithmically calculated route, just like a Roomba. Sometimes I wonder if an Alien that studied Earth from above would think the same of us humans. Zoomed out, we’re taking the same paths to work, the supermarket, or to our morning walks, every day at approximately the same time.

When we meet, we the old man and I exchange the same Good mornings, the same It’s good to see yous, the same Now Bernie gets his special treatments as every time. Meanwhile, Bernie himself stands there panting, recovering from the sprint he undertook, slightly raising his head to signal he’s ready.

I crouch down and start petting — or rather scratching — him behind his ears. His body is ninety percent fur. Thick, white, curly fur. And he smells not only of that typical dog smell, but also a not-so-slight touch of used socks. It takes all day for that smell to vanish from my hands.

Bernie is a stoic. He doesn’t like humans, but he also doesn’t show it. He just stands there, accepting his fate, whatever that fate may be. Only when the garbage-disposal truck arrives once every week does he start to furiously bark at it and its passengers in their bright orange suits. Because of his nonchalance, I couldn’t tell if he likes me either. But he surely enjoys my petting. I’m his cleaner shrimp.

After I’m done with grooming, I accompany Bernie and the old man on their short walk. We exchange life stories, and at one point the old man always asks me if it’s not boring for me to put up with an old-timer such as him.

“Not at all,” I reply every single time, which is true, I enjoy the wisdom and quirkiness of age. To prove it, I tell him the sad story of an old friend of my mother’s whom I inherited. He used to be short-tempered, always busy with work during daytime and hanging out with friends drinking at night. Then, one day, he found his daughter dead from an overdose in the bathtub of her apartment. It must have been days since she died. That was almost forty years ago. Today he is a very silent person, living a reclusive life consumed with guilt, visiting his daughter’s grave every day. And refusing even a single drop of alcohol ever since.

The old man laughs — I know that laugh. I use it myself when I’m uncomfortable.

“I don’t drink either,” he says. “But back when I was young, I was downright forced to do it.”

Then he goes on to tell me his story. Bernie meanwhile finds himself a cozy place to lie down to. He doesn’t understand the exact words, of course, but he knows what follows will be just about enough time for a well-deserved nap.

The old man tells me that after finishing law school he took a job at the police, because he married young and had a daughter already at this time. And the police seemed like a secure employer. The downside was that he had to move far away from his family to the countryside as an on-call judge, visiting crime scenes. There weren’t that many of them.

Most of his days he spent in a tiny, cold, and wet room without running water on the upper floor of an old train station his employer provided for him, waiting for calls that never came. Drinking was the only solution against the cold — and the boredom. Only on the weekends did he get to spend time with his family who lived back in the city.

Since he never cared about politics, a necessity back in the days, his hoped-for promotion and transfer to a job in the city took forever.

“But I didn’t want to quit such a secure employment,” he says. “After the war, safety was all we cared for, you know?”

Many years passed until it finally happened. Being reunited with his family after all.

“It also didn’t take long until I got called to a crime scene,” he tells me.

The melting pot of the big city is a different beast than the quiet rural area.

“When I arrived at the scene, police officers were warning me that the corpse wasn’t a pretty sight,” he says with a smile. “I just shrugged it off and went straight to the body, which lay covered under a blanket.”

The old man pauses for a moment, shaking his head, laughing.

“Turned out, it was my daughter.”

For a moment, I don’t know what to say. I also don’t remember what I said. Probably something like, “Oh no, this must be awful, I’m so sorry.”

The old man laughs again, smiles at me. He raises his cane, points it to our surroundings and says: “Well, what can you do? This is life. There’s so much beauty, too.”

Bernie, awakened from his nap, slowly gets up and walks his weary bones toward the feet of his old man. Showing up is all he can do.

It’s everything.

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Bernie (front, middle). Old man (back, right)

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