Thinkpieces

Not the People You See

Reflections on Senior Citizens and Life in the Country

Leah Rule |

These are not the people you see. Standing in line at the grocery store, I used to look straight past them until I came to the one I could relate to: the rocker with the studded belt, the chick with the crocheted hat. The man with the scruffy beard and soiled Carhart jacket was not there. The people here are not the people you see in movies or on television. It is as if they don’t exist. Hollywood lacks the relativity to correctly portray the man with the scruffy beard. His facial hair will be too new, the soiling intentional and unreal, and always, the teeth too straight. It took some time after I moved from my urban life to relate to the people of our small town.

Seniors, especially, had been missing from my view. Here in the country, they are the majority – the leaders, founders, and historians of everything you see. Their family name is synonymous with the signs on buildings and streets. The day we opened our bar and restaurant they came in droves. We watched with dropped jaws as they formed a line outside the dining room entrance, chatting with a lifelong familiarity to friends and neighbors as they waited for their turn at the buffet. “Do you have a senior price?” they would want to know.

They were gracious, and entitled. They would order drinks I had never made in eight years of bartending, and complain loudly if they were not made right – their way. Frequently the woman would do the ordering. I wondered if the men were all robbing the cradle or if they just don’t age as well. “He can’t see,” “He can’t hear,” the wives would tell me. “You want a hamburger!” they’d yell at him, and after the shake of an old man’s finger they’d let me know, “He wants raw onion on that.” Of course, each couple would always “split the fries,” either because of their small appetites or a fixed budget, I would imagine.


It brought back memories of my grandparents, long gone. I remember my grandma sitting next to my husband, Rob, at the dining room table. She took food from her plate and put it on his. “I can’t eat greens,” she’d say, “they make me gassy.”

“Getting old is for the birds!” she let me know. I wish my grandma had the strength of a community around her in the late years of her life. I wish she could have gone to dinner with neighbors and friends, gossiping about what the town president did and who said what. She was entitled to that.

I enjoyed the relationship I had with the elders. They’d tell me about their families and lives, what they did before retirement, little tidbits about life in the country before the highway was built, what things used to be like. They were always asking questions and wanting to know about my life, as well. Now when I go to the city I see the elderly lady in line at the store and I wonder. Is she one of us? Like me, did she just stop to pick up something our grocery stores don’t carry, manchengo cheese or udon noodles?

One day, Rob and I were driving to the city when I saw a flock of large birds feeding on something at the side of the road and in my excitement I yelled out “What are them?” I laughed immediately at my grammatical error as well as my excitement over seeing what Rob informed me were common turkey vultures. I am a stickler for grammar, which makes it difficult for me not to correct others when they use the wrong inflection of a pronoun, a common occurrence out here in the sticks.

In the movies, the hick vernacular is filled with errors and clichés. Perhaps this is somewhat truthful, but something about the actor’s skin denies a life spent trying to make ends meet and the dialog feels misunderstood. It was at the moment of the turkey vulture sighting that I first felt at home where we now live. Even though I have strong roots in the city, if you ask me now, “What are them?” I would tell you, “They are me and we can be seen everywhere.”