Compact and Spry

He came into my cubicle and told me that it was time to move me to the operating room. Nice guy and a very competent orderly, wheeling me through the narrow doorways and corridors, also taking care to assure me that all would be well.

After recovery whilst in the discharge process with my two ladies, we were receiving instructions about what to do next at home. The same orderly walked past us pushing another gurney.

When he was well past us, the nurse quietly confided to us that the man was 75 years old.

Seventy-five and in the finest of health, conveying usually younger patients (not me) hither, thither and yon.

I reflected that in my lifetime I had encountered two other older fellas who were, shall we say, of compact stature but were spry beyond their years.

Sue's grandfather was one such person. In 1971, we moved our belongings to another city on one of those steamy hot, summer days — one of the hottest days ever in point of fact. Our team consisted of Sue and me, in our early twenties, Sue's 28-year-old brother, Sue’s 40-something father, and her 70-something grandfather. Temperatures soared to 100 degrees as we carried  our belongings in the hot sun past the hot, bricked units to the seemingly distant centre of the townhouse complex where we would abide for my first years of teaching..

We four younger ones were all flagging in the heat but not grandpa. He just kept going back and forth and forth and back, carrying this box and that box. When we stopped to rest and replenish our dwindling resources, grandpa just kept going and going.

You guessed it; he was a compact and spry guy and fitter than us young-uns.

I also recalled one more encounter with another older man of similar compact stature. 

We were visiting Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, our fourth and final stop before motoring back to Phoenix and flying home. As we drove into the parking lot, a younger couple (we were in our fifties) that we had met at Monument Valley were there and just about to embark on a desert tour with a Navajo guide. Sue readily agreed to join them, thinking that we were about to take a jaunty jeep ride as we had done at Monument Valley. She was quite taken aback to discover that we would be hiking through the desert.

We descended the very steep steps into the canyon and staggered into the hot desert following our compact and spry elderly guide. He required no water as we walked along and no food as we stopped for a shared lunch with our fellow touristy hikers.

Like Sue's grandfather and my hospital orderly, our guide was one of those older guys who still exuded energy and stamina in his compact and spry body.

Grandad, by the way, lived to be 105 years old. In one of the oddities of life, he was buried beside his brother who died at the age of 2. Genetics are a crapshoot.