Open Mike: The Last of the Old Americans

Here's an exercise to try: don't complain at all for a whole week. I learned this from a man who never complained, Loyle Egger. He was a WWII veteran whose father, Fred, served in the armed forces for every minute of both WWI and WWII—not just of the US involvement, but the entire time hostilities were going on, anywhere.

If you complained, Loyle would let you go on for a while and then say, "aw, too bad!" As if to say, stop whining. I always figured it was probably something he heard a lot from Fred.

It's not that Loyle was perfect. He was cheerful, but with an edge—he'd argue with you, and he could be critical, and sometimes he would needle you until you wanted to strangle him. But he almost never complained.

One time he showed up for pool with a big bandage on his forearm. When we asked what happened, he said he was taking a drink to one of his guests, and while he was stepping over the sleeping dog, the dog decided to get up. "And I had to take the fall on my left arm because I was holding the drink in my right. So I hurt my arm. But I didn't spill a drop!"

I said, "Loyle, you're 89. At what age does it start to be prudent to walk around the dog?" He just shrugged and made a dismissive noise. Later, our friend Jerry said to me, "He's never going to walk around the dog. He just thinks he can do everything like he always did. That's the attitude that got him to 89 in the first place."

Sleeping in the garage
Here's my favorite Loyle story. Before he moved to his daughter's house in his dotage, he had some ten acres, give or take, parts of which were grassland, wetland, or woods. A key point to the story is that he had very few near neighbors—and they weren't very near. A large chunk of the land was lawn, and until fairly recently he still mowed his own grass himself with his John Deere. Anyway, one day, after finishing, he backed the John Deere into the garage as usual, but, as he was getting off, he fell backwards. He ended up lying awkwardly on his back on the concrete, jammed between the wall and the mower, with his legs awkwardly tangled up in the tractor. He tried to extricate himself but couldn't. So he lay there for a while. "I thought, well, I can't get up. So, what can I do?" he told me.

He decided the answer was...to scream. So he started screaming for help at the top of his lungs. Within just a few minutes he realized he wasn't going to be able to keep that up for very long, so he revised the plan. He would scream for help every fifteen minutes, in two stages. Scream for a minute or two, pause, then repeat. The idea was that people would hear him the first time, and then, while they were listening more intently, they'd zero in on the second round.

So he kept this up for three or four cycles. At that point there happened to be some workers across the road retrieving a load of yard waste for pretty much the only neighboring house within earshot. They weren't regular workers, weren't normally there, and were only there that day for a short time. But the plan worked: they heard Loyle screaming for help, went in the direction of the noise to investigate, heard the second set of screams, and eventually located Loyle and helped him out of his predicament.

"So everything worked out fine!" Loyle said cheerfully.

"Well, not really!" I retorted.

"What do you mean?"

"What would you have done if those people hadn't just happened to be there at that moment?"

"I guess I would have spent the night in the garage," he admitted. "But I would have been all right. My daughter Marsha calls me in the middle of every morning to check if I'm all right. If she didn't get an answer, she would have come over. Marsha would have found me. I wasn't in any danger."

"But Loyle, you would have had to spend the whole night on your back on the garage floor! It's Fall. It gets cold at night. What about dinner? What if you had to pee?"

"Oh, I would have been all right," he said, then added, in a quiet, rather annoyed tone, "I hope would have slept at least part of the night." You're 89, and you occasionally sleep on your back in the garage trapped behind the lawnmower. No big deal.

A good ending
I have a snapshot of Loyle in extreme old age that I might show you someday. But here's the picture I have of Loyle in my mind. A group of us used to play pool at the Moose Club. One day several years ago, before COVID, it was raining when we were leaving the Moose. I had parked on the far side of the parking lot, and for some reason was just sitting there in the car—maybe I was looking at my phone, or just thinking, I don't know. Anyway, I watched Loyle and his good friend Norm Wilson come out of the Moose. They were both lean but frail—Norm is a retired Xerox executive, as far as I know, a few years Loyle's senior (he's 98 now, despite the fact that he gets pneumonia every winter), and they're both widowers. Both could still get around pretty well at that point, although they might not have beaten the tortoise to the finish line. Well, Loyle was walking Norm to his car, shielding him with his umbrella. Loyle had his hand protectively on Norm's shoulder, and they were walking side by side, two old friends. I don't think they knew I was there. They walked into and out of the perfect composition—the right angle, the right distance, wonderful expressions, the protective gesture, the umbrella, the gray day, one guy protecting the other from the rain. I didn't have my camera with me. But I can see the picture in my mind's eye still. I could reconstruct it pretty precisely with stand-ins. I figure the two of them will be the last of the WWII generation that I know, anyway.

Loyle died last October, and he had a good death. The two of us and our friend Dan played pool just ten days before he died, at the bowling alley, with him ratcheting around the table using his walker, and at lunch he re-told a few of his favorite WWII stories that we had heard many times before. He died after an illness of just a few days, during which he was able to call some old friends, including Norm, to tell them he would never be seeing them again.

In my observation—I saw him every week for the last five years of his life, more or less—Loyle had about a three-year decline, soldiered through his extreme dotage stoically (with much help from Marsha and his granddaughter Becky and other family members, I'm sure), and expired at the end of a very short hospital stay. We should all be so lucky.

And here's the coda to the above: when I told the story of the fall behind the John Deere to his daughter Marsha, on a phone call just this past week, she had never heard it before! He never even told her. It would have been too much like complaining, I suppose. That was Loyle.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Tom Duffy: "The story reminds me of my sainted mother, God rest her soul. At 87 we insisted she use a medical alert pendant. She'd been resistant because of the monthly fee, despite money not being a concern.

"A week later I got a call, in the middle of the night, from the servicing company, saying the pendant had been activated. I drove to her apartment and opened the door for the police who had also been notified. We found my mother lying in the bathtub unable to extricate herself. After we got her back to bed I told her I was glad she had got the pendant. She insisted she didn't need it. 'Mom, you were stuck in the bathtub and couldn't get out.' 'I was perfectly prepared to spend the night in the tub!'

"I guess living through the Depression and World War II gives you some perspective."

darlene: "Your words weave worlds of wonderment, Mike. I feel like I got to know Loyle through your memories and storytelling."

Moose: "'Never explain, never complain!' I explain all too often, I suspect. I very seldom complain. I can't claim the apparent perfection of your late friend, but I'm pretty darn good. One benefit is that, when one eschews complaining, it seems that the number of things worth complaint diminish, rather dramatically."

Richard Nugent: "I am reminded of a story about my mother-in-law, Mary, who immigrated to the US from Ireland as a teenager. A widow in her mid-eighties living alone, she was very self sufficient, if a bit frail. During a visit I suggested that she might want to put a smoke detector in her home. She demurred, objecting that if it went off in the middle of the night it would “scare the b’jesus out of me.” Will our generation ever be as endearing?"

Comments

[Bahi]

A moving and beautifully written piece.

[Dan Khong]

One description came to mind : TRUE GRIT.

[Mike Ferron]

Very inspiring. Something I learned recently is never have a victim mentality. Much related to “Don’t Complain”.

[Gaspar Heurtley]

Back in the early nineties, when almost no one owned a cell phone, my grandfather had a small accident that made him use crutches for a few weeks.

All the family insisted in that if something happened to him he should be able to call for help, so we spent a lot of money on the smallest phone we could find, a huge Motorola with an even bigger antenna.

He reluctantly accepted and immediately recorded a greeting message to the voicemail that said “call me to my land line”, got the phone into a drawer and never touched it again.

He passed away almost ten years ago, never owned a cell phone.

[Dillan]

I miss people from that generation. My grandfather was similarly stoic in the face of old age and even terminal illness. He loved to complain, though. He didn't complain about his person problems, no, never, but he would complain about politicians, the neighbours, the price of gasoline and ground beef, and how society was going to hell. I really do miss him, and the others who were a lot like him.

[Daniel]

Have a neighbor who is 93 and still farms 1000 acres. Hires help for the heavier lifting but most of it he does himself. He also takes care of the cattle - all Angus these days.

[Moose]

Huh! It occurs to me that my birth was as close in time to the end of the civil War as it is to my age now.

Weird!

[Patrick Perez]

The mental photo you have of the two of them is better than any you might have taken with an actual camera. The exposure was perfect, same for focus and composition. Nothing unwanted intruded into the frame. We should all be so good with our actual cameras!

Patrick

[Keith Mitchell]

Loyle was of a generation made of sterner stuff, that expected less from life, while making the most of what they had. I nursed for a while many years ago in Tasmania in a hospital in Hobart. We had a fellow come in the orthopedics ward I worked on with a fractured hip. He was a farmer aged 91 and lived on his own. The accident had occured on his farm about 80 kilometres out of Hobart. He had been throwing out bales of hay to his sheep from the back of his utility vehicle and had fallen and fractured his neck of femur. On his own, he had dragged himself a kilometre back to his farmhouse and managed to ring the local nursing station who came out and stabilised him and sent him by ambulance to Hobart. He arrived on my ward late at night. The admission interview went like this, "Jack, have you been in a hospital recently?" "No, I've never been in a hospital except for a wound in the war." What medications do you take? "Never take any medications." Do you drink or smoke? "Don't smoke, but every Friday I go to the Returned Services League in town and get a bit drunk, know I shouldn't, but always do." Stupid question I know, but the next question from me made me realise what a different world we live in now. What do you do for exercise Jack? "I work." 91 and tough as nails

[Richard Tugwell]

Good advice - although hard to follow in current times

[David Dyer-Bennet]

At this point I have multiple friends who have spent 3 or more days stuck on the floor in their own homes. I do recommend medic-alert pendants, or at the very least being religious about keeping your phone on you, and also regular check-in calls with old people you know.

[Graeme Scott]

That was a brilliant post Mike. Thanks for sharing.

[Khürt L Williams]

Interesting.

[Scott]

I confess that I complain more than I should. However, every time I visit my rheumatologist (I have arthritis that definitely interferes with doing some things I love to do), I am reminded that I’m happier being me, with my problems, than any of the other people in the waiting room, with their apparent problems.