All The World Before Us

The old man sat, very upright, on the bench, as if sitting to attention.  His hands were clasped on his lap and he stared, straight ahead, at the spectacular view before him.  He didn’t seem at all surprised when a small boy wandered along the path and came and sat beside him.
“Hi” The small boy said, edging himself back on the seat so that his back was supported, which unfortunately meant that his feet were now left dangling in mid-air.
The old man prised himself away from the view and turned to look at his companion.
“Hello” He nodded, “Your folks not with you?”
“Nah, it’s too much of a climb, they reckon.  They’re happy for me to come alone” The small boy produced a paper bag from his coat pocket.  “Sweet?” He proffered the open bag.
“What you got?” The old man peered into the bag, but it was difficult to see what was in there.
“Dunno, what’s your favourite?”
“Liquorice Allsorts” The old man said, rolling the words around his tongue with deep satisfaction.
“Yeah?  I don’t care for them, much” The boy shook his head and peered into the bag, “Which one do you like?”
“Oh, I prefer the one that’s like a double-decker sandwich, white with black liquorice for the filling, do you know the one I mean?”
The boy opened the bag and looked inside.
“Huh!” He said with mild surprise, offering it once again to the old man who nodded and drew two of his favourite allsorts from the bag, which was now, apparently, filled just with them.
“You like them too, eh?” The old man said, sucking his sweet with delight.
“Nah, I like cola cubes” The boy said, extracting a cola cube from the bag.
“I used to like chocolate limes” The old man admitted, dipping into the offered bag and extracting a chocolate lime, “But I ate so many, I kinda got sick of them” The chocolate lime was now a liquorice allsort.
The two sat, in silence, staring ahead at the view and munching their sweets.
“Some view up here, huh?” The boy said, eventually.
“Yeah, sure is” The old man agreed, “it’s kinda like the whole world’s laid out before us”
“There sure is a lot to see” The boy was wide-eyed with wonder.
“I’ve seen most of it” The old man chuckled, “and it’s… ok, I guess”
“I wanna see all of it before I’m as old as you”
“Oh, I’m sure you will” The old man nodded, “I used to be the same”
“Been some year, huh?” The boy looked at the old man with a twinkle in his eye.
“Ah well” The old man shrugged, “you know how it is, some good, some bad, some mediocre”
“What’s mediocre?  Sounds like some kind of cooked pudding, like tapioca!”  The boy shuddered.
“No, it kinda means average, you know?  Neither good nor bad”
“What would you say was good?”
“Hmm, easier to say what was bad” The old man said with a wry smile.
“Ok” The boy nodded.
“Gaza” The old man said, with a grim look on his face.
“Yeah” The boy nodded, “Ukraine?”
“Well, yeah, but that was already going on, you know?” The old man wagged a finger.
“Syria?”
“Maybe. Jury’s out on that one”
“The U.S. Election?”
“Oh yeah” The old man chuckled.
“What’s so funny about that?”
“Well, I got to see the result but, with a bit of luck, I’ll miss all the outcome” He continued to chuckle, “Man, folk were so shocked!  It was a treat to see their faces”
“And the good?”
“Well, that’s kinda tricky” The old man fidgeted and thought for a moment, “I’ll tell you one story that struck me as funny.  There was this dog, see, got abandoned miles from anywhere.  Well, this dog, it walked over a hundred miles back to its old home…”
“I don’t see what’s so darn funny about that” The boy frowned.
“Ah, but you see, when it got home, the first thing it did was to bite the owner who’d abandoned it!  I thought that was pretty good!” The old man laughed until he wheezed.  The boy giggled too.
“That’s kinda cool!  Is it true?”
“Who knows, these days?”  The old man shrugged, “But I kinda think it should be, even if it ain’t.  I’ve got a theory about dogs, wanna hear it?”
“Sure” The boy nodded and sucked another sweet.
“Well, it’s like this.  You hope for good, and I guess there’s some good going on all the time, everywhere, but it don’t make the News much, you see?  Small acts of kindness, occasional heroics, selflessness, it does happen you know.”  He looked at the boy, a glimmer of hope in his eye.  “Then there’s the stuff where people stop thinking about people as people, and start thinking about them as things.  That’s when it gets real nasty.”
“That so?” The boy chewed his sweet, thoughtfully.
“Oh yeah!  It ain’t original, it’s been said before, but that’s how it is.  I mean, take immigration. People get real worked up about folks from other countries coming over and living in their country and they’re all jumpin’ up and down and demanding these folks get dragged out and sent back to where they belong, but you ask them about the family that lives peaceably next door and they’ll say ‘Oh no, we don’t mean them, they’re hard-working folk who pay their taxes and don’t bother no-one.  No, we mean them other immigrants’” The old man shook his head and sighed.  “Of course, the ones you have to watch out for are those who wouldn’t give a fig about their neighbours, those who’d be only too happy to be doing the dragging.”
“There’s always someone to blame” The boy nodded. “But, where do dogs come into it?”
“I’m coming to that!” The old man snapped, slapped his thigh, and shook his head, “I don’t know what it takes to make folk realise we’re all the same.  Don’t matter where we’re from, how we look, what we believe.  Which brings me to dogs, you know?  You’ve got your hairless chihuahuas at one end and your hulking Great Danes at the other, and they couldn’t be more different, yet they’re all dogs and, what’s more, they know that they’re dogs.”  The old man pinched at his trouser leg and brushed an invisible speck from it, “We seem to struggle with that, when it comes to people.  I reckon we could learn a lot from dogs, if we only paid them some heed.”  He sighed, deeply, “You know, I sometimes wonder if we need to be threatened by something else, something from outside?  Maybe then we’d pull together and acknowledge we’re all people and we need to be able to rely on one another.  Ah, who knows!” He shrugged and went back to looking at the view.
“It’s going to be a better world, when I’m grown up” The boy said, confidently.
“Ha!  Yeah, that’s what I thought too” The old man chuckled.
“You mean, there was a time when you weren’t all grown up, and old?” The boy looked shocked.
“Yeah, sure there was” The old man nodded and smiled, “I was like you, once”
“Wow!” The boy looked at him, amazed.
“It’s time you know, it catches up with you” The old man coughed and wheezed a little. “You wanna know something real scary, kid?”
“Oh, sure!” The boy looked excited.
“You never feel any different, not in here” The old man tapped his forefinger against his wrinkled forehead, “When I was your age, I thought when you were old you would be different, you know?  Something would happen to make your mind match your body but, guess what, it never does.  It’s just you trapped in something that’s wearing out fast”
“Ah, phooey!” The boy dismissed this contention as improbable
“It’s true” The old man shrugged, “Speaking of time, I’d better be getting along.  It’s getting kind of late and that wind’s nippy” He drew the lapels of his coat together, to protect him from the chill. “You coming?”
“Nah, not just yet” The boy grinned, “I think I’ll stick around here a while longer”
“Ok kid” The old man got up, with considerable difficulty.  For a while, he was bent double with his hands on his knees, wheezing and grimacing, then he straightened up, slowly and painfully, and began to shuffle off.  The boy noticed how stooped he was, as he walked, and how he seemed to have shrunk inside his overcoat.  
“See ya around!” The old man called, weakly, as he disappeared into the gloom.
“Yeah, sure, old-timer” The boy grinned, took another sweet out of his packet and noticed that his feet were now touching the floor, but he hadn’t moved forward on the bench at all. ‘That ‘time’ thing he was on about,” He mused, “maybe he’s got a point’ but it was a thought that was fleeting and scudded off rapidly.  The boy smiled, had another sweet and watched the twinkling lights of the world blink and gutter in the dusk.
“It’s my world” He thought and squirmed with excitement, “and I’m going to have some real fun with it!”

Happy New Year (I hope)!