There’s a store here at the country club.

Cannot tell you how much that sentence amuses me circa 1995 thinking I was going to end up in a VW bus tooling around America playing in a band that would be the next Grateful Dead as I wrote On The Road for Gex X.

I say “amuses” because that’s an easier word than the yawning maw that opened up somewhere between college and the rest of my life and I shoveled whatever dreams I had into it in the hopes that it would spit out happiness.

But there’s a store, at the country club, where I live. And I watched a man I’ve met a few times and know a little bit shuffle his way to the electric carts and proceed to maneuver his way toward the grocery aisles.

Badly, because it’s a grocery cart and designed to diminish its user.

And he was diminished before he took his seat.

His life behind him looms large, having done things.

Good things.

Things that have meant a lot to a lot of people.

But now, he’s old.

Not just older, but old.

Recovering from injuries that happened because he is old.

Time doesn’t always take gently.

It rips at us, too.

Stripping away what we once were, leaving something behind that bumps its way through produce.