This week’s news

If you followed the news this week, you’ll know that Big Economic Thoughts are in order.

Well, sorry. I’m thinking about this instead: There is a blind old man who lives in a run-down trailer near a distant, spooky, backwoods swamp.

He’s the father of a pal of mine, one of the first folks I met after I got out of the Navy. Back then, I lied to my girlfriend (imagine that), and told her I’d get a real job and become a suitably successful corporate type.

After all, she had social aspirations.

But I didn’t.

My job was, basically, airport bum. I flew traffic reporting for AM radio stations and gave flight lessons to dentists and housewives. On the side I wrote financial forecasting computer models, and counted a major insurance company among my clients, but I hid this fact from my girlfriend, since it would only have encouraged her aspirations.

When it came to civilian aviation, I was clueless. Fortunately, I met a tradesman on the airport who had a small shop. He was an avionics (aircraft electronics) expert; he used to fix F-4 fighters in the Navy. His good advice and moral support were valuable as I sought to survive in the local industry.

He was from a poor, and I mean dirt-poor, background. He grew up on a hardscrabble ranch, but the family lost that since. He was one of the best read, smartest, and most capable people I’ve ever known, and I’ve known a lot of them. No college for him; the family couldn’t afford it.

Soon, off I went into the world. But we kept in touch. Over the years, and, well, decades, he’d talk of his dad, who, to me, loomed like a figure in a country song ballad. Poor, but hard working. Economically doomed, but always resourceful. Big, tough, a good fighter who wouldn’t take crap from a stranger, or anybody in a necktie, but fair and kind-hearted. A man so poor, he’d have to live by his wits forever, and raise a family on them, too. The mother had died young. This was never related to me in whining tones, but, instead, over the years, in matter-of-fact anecdotes as we’d swap tales about sundry subjects.

I’ve covered a lot of turf since those days. Enough that, a couple of years ago, I was passing through the deep southern U.S., and, somewhere between Detroit, Miami, and Saipan, I had two days of free time. I rented a car, and wound up in the remote, piney-woods south. It took me three hours to find the trailer in those backwoods roads.

And there he was, after all those decades of tales and anecdotes: The old man.

He was, from diabetes, blind. He lived in a steamy, dilapidated trailer by a swamp. Roaches swarmed all over the place. He sat, shirtless, in the collapsed remnants of a cheap reclining armchair. That squalor trumps much of what I’ve seen in the Third World.

The old man had been in the Navy for a hitch. He told me all about it. Besides a couple of old medals and ribbons, that man had nothing. I don’t mean he was a miser with CDs in the bank. I mean he probably has about 30 dollars to his name.

The son, having lost his business, and with nothing to fall back on, is every bit as poor as the old man.

I ascertained that the old man spends his days listening to the radio. He has a little boom box. He listens to talk shows and preachers; any voices, I guess, to fill the vacuum. When it isn’t too hot or too rainy, they take him to a plastic chair in the stretch of mud behind his trailer so he can get some fresh air until the mosquitoes drive him back inside.

I am in the habit of ordering CDs of old radio shows for the old man. They keep him company. He rations the listening, so as to make them last.

But the last CD was defective. His son called me, as I sat on the other side of the world, fully 10 time zones away, saying that just before a mystery show reached its conclusion, the CD became garbled. The old man had been listening to four consecutive episodes on four consecutive days, looking forward to the unraveling of the whodunit on the fifth day, and, crunch, a messed-up CD threw a wrench in the works. Neither father nor son has a credit card, computer, or Internet connection; they have no idea how to order another CD.

So the first item on my day’s agenda is thus set. I’ll ignore the news today, it will just get in the way of the truth.