I experienced a profound scene today at TAT,
an eighty-year-old, Italian restaurant in the east
end of Columbus, now deteriorated into an area
in which it would be wise to wear a bullet-proof vest.
Slouched in a booth, eating angel-hair pasta,
I sensed oncoming movement in the aisle to my left.
An old woman appeared, plodding past me,
supporting herself on a walker, accompanied by
a man and woman whom I assumed were her son
and daughter. When she reached her table, she stopped,
took tiny, sideways steps to her chair. Son and daughter,
on either side of their mother, helped lower her onto the seat,
the old lady, with hands behind her, felt for the chair.
Many people use walkers, are much more incapacitated
than this aged person, but the moment was cold water
in my brain, sobering me into seeing the core of
what it means to be old. Her youth, and all privileges
inherent in it were gone as irretrievably as a letter
slipped into a mailbox slot. She wasn’t ever coming
back to who she was. My thought wasn’t an original,
breakthrough idea. It was a bombshell realization,
a shocking truth, immutable and sad: Being old is
a one way passage away from the doorstep of
a person’s original self and from the delusion of
a second chance at time.
R. Nikolas Macioci earned a PhD from The Ohio State University, taught for Columbus City Schools for thirty years. OCTELA, the Ohio Council of Teachers of English, named Nik Macioci the best secondary English teacher in the state of Ohio. Nik is the author of twenty-three books. He was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize
