When you buy a house, well, sometimes you find treasure. That’s always awesome when that happens but the Hammond street house contained no treasure, just dope paraphernalia, syringes, a pipe and a basement wall full of little pieces of tin foil. All was not lost, however. We discovered treasure next door.

Joe is in his 90s and possessed of an alert mind. I never saw a sprier man using a cane in my life and, Lord love him, he likes to talk nearly as much as I like to listen.

Turns out this man is a WWII veteran. Right there, I was hooked. There is something riveting about hearing war stories from the mouth of an eyewitness. You can glean the facts from any old book, but there is something about listening to a 92 year old man remember when he was a scared 18 year old boy in the heat of battle, so scared as a matter of fact, that before it was all said and done, he gave some serious lip to a superior officer. Joe didn’t get court-martialed for the simple reason that he was right and his officer was wrong.

Joe regaled me with some stories, and then suddenly his voice trailed off. He gave his cane a little wave and said with disgust, “Pah! I’m just an old man.”

Yep. Joe IS an old man. I’m not going to argue with that at all. What I do take exception to is the “just” he stuck in that sentence.

I look around me sometime and wonder what happened to Joe’s world, a world where graduation marked the end of childhood. A world where hard work was expected. Where hard work was respected. A world where young men volunteered to go to war because they fervently believed in what they were a part of. It’s not like that now, and listening to the stories of old men (and old women) give you a glimpse of what we have lost.

A simple story of a morning spent picking strawberries. for instance. Ellen is in a nursing home, but her faraway gaze made it clear that her easy life today is not nearly as satisfying to her as back when children were expected to be a productive part of their families. The wistfulness in her voice struck my heart.

Jim Morrison tells the story of nearly anything in Warren County. That history flows like a river from him and out into this world. He really ought to sit down and write a book.

Larry Eller’s remembrances of Pearl Harbor made it clear that, under pressure, anyone can discover that within them beats the heart of a hero. You can be scared to death and larger than life at the exact same moment.

Back home in Russell, Louise remembered that she was ironing when the radio bulletins about Pearl Harbor began. She remembered watching the young men in her community rush to enlist. Her beau was a farmer and his work at home was deemed important enough that he wasn’t permitted to join the military. He came down the hill on his white horse to visit her because gas was rationed.

White-haired Dorothy remembering sitting on the banks of the Conewango Creek with ‘the kids’ listening to Lee play his guitar and sing. “He could sing ‘Old Shep’ so sweetly that he made all the girls cry.” Lee’s voice is silenced now, but the sweetness his voice still touches an old woman’s heart.

I remember Lee’s voice too, not as a young man singing songs, but as an old man. He was raised in our church, but he left it as soon as he got too old for his mama to tell him what to do. He remembered the day that he was working in his garage. The pastor stopped in to say that God had laid it on his heart that Lee should be the Sunday School teacher.

Lee told that pastor that he had the wrong man and sent him back out the garage door. At that moment, lightning struck the cupola of the garage and the explosion knocked Lee right on the ground. The pastor came rushing back in the garage to make sure that he was alright. Dazedly, Lee looked up at the pastor and said, “You know, I’ve been thinking that maybe I should teach Sunday school.”

Even funnier was his wife, Jean. She was in her kitchen washing dishes. Remember the old days, when counter tops had that metal strip running around them? She got quite a taste of that shock too, which came as a punch in the stomach that sent her flying backwards. And she said, “I don’t know why God zapped me. I went to church every Sunday!”

There are stories from immigrants to our community, who came looking for (and finding) the things they needed to build new lives. Their struggles and their gratitude reminds us that our families were all, at one point or another, immigrants to our country.

I think of a family gathering to bake bread in the outdoor brick oven made by the younger hands of predecessors now gone to their eternal rest. In the telling of their stories, a family’s history handed off to the next generation as the many branches of that one family tree break bread together. The stories are just as nourishing to their minds as the bread is to their bodies.

An elderly lady grew up in a far different church, but somehow along the way, she was able to set aside those rigid beliefs to reach out to her gay grandson. There’s a story the world needs to hear, the story of what can be overcome with grace and love.

I sit here and remember the stories of old men and old women that I have known. They come to me quickly, one right after another, more quickly than my fingers can tap them out onto the computer screen.

Joe, my friend, I have listened to many a story from my elders. Never once has it popped into my mind that their tellers were ‘just’ old men or ‘just’ old women. Those stories are a treasure, and I’m the better for hearing them. I look forward to hearing more of yours.