Homecoming

It was no surprise when my wife, who could strike up a spirited conversation with a stone, was soon talking with the attendant who was pushing me in my wheel chair down the endless corridors at JFK.  This was on Wednesday, when we landed after 15 days in Jerusalem.  She learned that he arrived a year ago from Guyana, where he was a self-employed landscaper, after his wife, his children, and his grandchildren had settled in the States.  She learned that he is a Muslim and that in another week, at about the time Ramadan ends,  he will be celebrating his 55^th birthday.  On the basis of his appearance, I’d say he was the descendant of indentured servants that the British  brought over from India in the 19^th century to work their colony’s plantations.

A kindly and considerate man, he asked me if I’d like to relieve myself before waiting in line at passport control.  After I gratefully agreed to his proposal, he wheeled me into the men’s room and told me he’d come back for me later.  After finishing my business there, I returned to my wheel chair and waited for him.  Looking straight ahead I saw two men standing at urinals.  One of them, who looked to be in his 30s, stood further away from his receptacle than is normal, enabling me to see the stream of his urine. 

To call it a stream is a misnomer.  It was more like a torrent, a horizontal Niagara Falls.  I recalled a short story – or was it a novel? - in which a bride listened for the first time to the sound of her husband’s urinating and reflecting that it sounded as if the urine were issuing from a horse.  The story followed the couple until they were very old, and the vigorous husband was now a feeble old man. 

I too once peed like a horse and of course I thought nothing of it.  Nor could the young man whose Niagara of urine I had glimpsed imagine that some day the flow might become smaller and smaller, issuing forth with less and less force, as his prostate gradually squeezed his urethra.  Nor could he know that if he developed prostate cancer, small growths, removed every few months, might additionally impede the flow and that the torrent would become a trickle.   

My attendant returned and wheeled me through passport control, attended to the luggage retrieval, and finally wheeled me to the taxi stand.  I thanked him for his help, tipped him, and told him I hoped that when I got to be 55, I would look as good as he does now.  “But you’ve already reached it,” he said, taking him a moment to appreciate my joke. 

There was another joke, one I didn’t tell him: while youth cannot imagine what it’s like to be old, the old don’t forget what it was like to be young.