Cool Old Guy

An older gentlemen started visiting the Dominion about a year ago on a weekly basis. He is the affable and awesome sort of old chap, a dude in his late 70s who possesses boundless mirth, sharp wit, and excellent stories which Fernando found just marvelous to hear. Fernando has no idea where this guy came from and why he'd never stopped by the store before that point, but that's all beside the point. Cool Old Guy was here to stay, and Fernando was more than fine with that.

This is a man who'd served in the Korean War, one who traveled overseas to places as disparate as Thailand, Norway, and the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza; he attended Michigan State University back when it was still called Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences. He married his college sweetheart and worked, over the years, as a civic engineer, a shipbuilder, and a woodworker. He collects fossils and has an irrepressible curiosity for the sciences, and also more “realistic” science-fiction literature and movies (“Way I see it, I'll never get off this rock, so it'll always be fictional to me personally.”).

His speech is not filthy or vulgar, simply factual. He does not shy away from topics which might be considered in bad taste or embarrassing. He told Fernando about his collection of Playboy magazines, which go all the way back to issue #1 (“And they're all still perfectly readable, though not even God could tell you how some of those pages still turn,” he said). They have had frank and not pants-on-head stupid conversations about American politics and normative political and social philosophy, something which never fucking happens.

Cool Old Guy spoke smatterings of no fewer than seven languages in his heyday: English, Japanese, Korean, Russian, German, Spanish, and Latin, though anything not named English is limited to curse words and naughty names for body parts these days. He did not just learn rote phrases to get by on a daily basis, but delved into the underlying grammar and structure of the languages he knew. His worldliness imparted upon him awareness that different cultures parse the world in different ways and that those differences are communicated through idiom and metaphor. He recognized that, though he could once speak Japanese or Latin, perhaps get by or even thrive in places that used those languages, he was not and could never “be” Japanese or Latin. He also loves witty turns of language, subtle puns and jokes which play with the words used in the jokes' construction instead of grandiose and hilarious observational humor in the vein of Patton Oswalt or Louis C.K.

Of course, they also discussed movies. Aside from his love of science-fiction. Cool Old Guy adores comedy, and is far more open to what falls under the potentially “good” umbrella than Fernando. He'll give anything a fair shake, even if it or they later turned out to be stinkers.

One afternoon, Cool Old Guy had just picked up a stack of five movies (one should also mention this man never returns anything late; instead he pays ahead for multiple nights) and is preparing to finalize his transaction when he suddenly says to Fernando, “You know, Gandhi was a really remarkable man.”

“Oh?” Fernando says. Perhaps Cool Old Guy had an amusing anecdote or observation involving the revered Indian activist and statesman.

“Well, he spent his entire life walking barefoot, not wearing sandals or shoes, so the soles of his feet became like leather. He wouldn't eat meat and lived entirely on eating greens...of course this left him kind of spindly and when you eat nothing but veggies your breath leaves a lot to be desired, but he did it because he held fast to his spiritual beliefs.”

The briefest of pauses, then: “I guess you could say he was a super-calloused, fragile mystic hexed with halitosis.”

Fernando blinks once, then twice more. “Oh. My.” More blinks. “Oh my.”

IDGAF if the pun has been around for ages and Cool Old Guy heard it somewhere else. It's the first Fernando had heard of it, and it made his fucking day.