The Man on the Bench

I sat down on the bench in the park next to an elderly man. A border collie was lying panting at his feet, its long pink tongue hanging out of its mouth, a look of satisfaction as he held his one paw over the once-yellow tennis ball, now a rusty brown and covered in grass clippings.

I had seen the man earlier, hitting the ball with a small wooden panel bat, as I sat drinking my coffee at the kiosk, his lively black-and-white collie chasing after it as if its life depended on it. I wondered where the elderly man got his energy from and why he didn’t have a small dog like a Yorkshire Terrier or Maltese; these seemed to be the most popular dog breeds among senior folk.

As I took my seat at the other end of the bench, the black and white collie looked at me, commanding my attention, wagging its tail. ‘Hello,’ I said. The man leaned down and put his hand on the dog's head, stroking it as he said something I couldn’t discern; the dog looked up at him in happy acknowledgement and settled down, its head resting on two front paws, the dirty ball pushed to the side.

‘They are lively ones, aren’t they?’ I said. He nodded; ‘She certainly keeps me on my toes, Bonnie does,’ he replied, looking down affectionately at the now sleeping dog at his feet. ‘ I am pleased that she is unaware of the world we now live in; animals are lucky they simply get on with life wanting for little other than their basic needs.’ I nodded in agreement.’ Life does move fast these days,’ I said, ‘difficult to keep up with sometimes.’

‘You are a young man and have grown up with all this technology that now dominates our lives, and now with AI, I wonder where the world is heading. Don’t you feel betrayed as I do with everything that is going on?

I sensed that he wanted to speak his mind and allowed him to continue.

‘I am from the silent generation’, he began, ‘and there aren’t too many of us left now, but the values we eschewed have disappeared in a flash; the destruction of moral fibre, honesty and decency has all been dissipated in a fog of deceit fed to us by the overhyped media in the pursuit of revenue rather than acting as a carefully balanced fulcrum of opinion. The tragedy is that this has been driven by a handful of humans; we are being betrayed like never before, as happened during the horrors of World War Two, an event where my Father lost his chance to live his life shortly after giving me mine. Millions of us were denied the opportunity to enjoy the warmth, humour or guidance of a Father or a Mother due to the whim and misguided principles of a handful of our fellow humans, and it is still happening today in our so-called enlightened world.

I could only nod in agreement as he continued.

'Each one of us is a miracle in itself; why don’t we respect that and give each other the space to grow and experience the only life we are all given at the beginning? Why are so many people not allowed to enjoy the wonder of nature, to take a walk on the beach or in a forest to marvel at the regeneration of plants, to see the opening of a flower and the settlement of bees and butterflies on a petal. To see the rising sun and enjoy the last vestiges of the day and dream of many more to come. To feel the warmth and embrace of another, to smell a newborn baby which we hold in our arms. You only have to look around to see what millions of people are enduring.’

He seemed to be tearing up as he let his feelings out. I felt somewhat apprehensive, or was I embarrassed on behalf of my generation to be sitting with this man? I would rather call him a gentleman; he was well spoken and immaculately dressed and groomed. I quickly did some mental arithmetic as I realised I was talking to a man in his eighties, given that he was born during World War 2.

He discreetly wiped a tear from his eye as he continued.

‘Money came about as a means of exchanging value: you want food, you trade yourself as labour to get it, or give something to one to get the other; that’s how it was for millennia. Today, money is only a series of numbers; the more you have, the more you can acquire. The more you acquire, the greater your status; forget the moral value of the millionaire or billionaire, forget the integrity or morality of the owner, simply look at the numbers, and then admire them to please their ego.’ He continued in his low-pitched, easy-on-the-ear voice.

‘I look with disdain, knowing full well that it is generally not acquired through hard work or integrity but more through manipulation, greed, and grift.’

He paused, looking thoughtful as he stared into the distance. Children playing catch, shrieking as they did, momentarily caught his attention, and I wasn’t sure if he expected me to continue or was merely collecting his thoughts; I waited. He cleared his throat.

‘I am afraid that our world, the only one we have, is too fast-moving with technology that will in time totally consume humanity; we will self-destruct as we are doing now; the world debt is so large that it is meaningless and sits not in a bank but in cyberspace it cannot even be touched like having coin in hand,’ he rubbed his fingers together, ‘ it has no physical presence it is intangible, it doesn’t really exist does it’ he questioned as he looked at me with his piercing blue but wise eyes. ‘Think of the everyday person battling to put food on the table or house themselves; they are all being betrayed, perhaps the biggest betrayal ever.’

I was about to continue the unexpected conversation and give my generation's viewpoint, but before I could, his dog started nudging the man’s leg, whimpering quietly. ‘Dinner time, he said to the dog. ‘Excuse me, I must get Bonnie home for her evening meal.’ He got up ‘Come on, girl, ’ he said ‘Nice to meet you.’

Before I could say more, he had hit the ball, and Bonnie had bolted after it. I watched him walk away rapidly with the gait of a much younger man than I had imagined him to be, swinging the bat beside him as he went.

I sat quietly for a while thinking on the man’s words. The man had stirred a distant memory of my grandfather, exacerbated by a faint trace of Old Spice aftershave when the man with the border collie rose to leave. My grandfather passed away before I reached my teens. He was a gentleman always immaculately groomed and clean-shaven, careful with his appearance. Just like the man on the bench. As a child, my grandfather often brought me to the park, and together we sailed small remote-controlled yachts on the lake; we also had many ice creams bought from the kiosk, on this very bench. I smiled as I recalled how he would also load me up with candy, warning me in good nature not to tell my Mom that I was being spoilt with an excess of sugar.

I looked down at the bench and noticed that the man had left a book behind: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I picked up the book and recalled the impact it had on me and wondered whether the man had left it deliberately or had forgotten it. I opened the cover, and inside was an envelope with an address on it. I looked inside the envelope; it was empty. ‘Probably using this as a bookmark,’ I thought. ‘What!’ I said aloud, a chill running down my spine. ‘I am sure this was my grandfather’s address where he lived in his later years, a small terrace not far from where I was now. I had to meet this man again, and maybe he had left the book deliberately or not, but it certainly would give me an opportunity to meet this interesting man again and perhaps speak from the angle of my generation and the new world technology that concerned him so much; perhaps I could get him to understand the benefits of all the rapidly changing tech that was taking place.

It was getting late, and we had people coming over for dinner. I hadn’t bought the wine that I had come out to obtain from my favourite wine merchants. I would find the man later now that I had what I thought could be his address.

During our dinner and the idle chatter that friends indulge in, I told our gathering about the encounter with the elderly gentleman and the uncanny feeling that I had about my grandfather, mentioning the Old Spice and the border collie seeming a little lively for a man of his age. I stopped mid-sentence as I related my story. ‘Oh gosh, my grandfather had a border collie, ’ I said as I felt the familiar shiver down my back.’ It had only just occurred to me at that moment of relating the encounter. Everyone joined in the discussion about weird things that they had experienced, and as the evening wore on and we all had had many glasses of wine, the tales became stranger.

I was on a business trip for the next four days and had little time to give the matter much more thought. It was only when I returned home and saw the book on the hall table that I decided I would try and make contact with the gentleman.

The next day was a Saturday, and I had the time to visit the address on the envelope, I knew it well as the last house my Grandad had lived in, I hadn’t been back since he had passed away, we lived in the outer suburbs and it was only when I was at work in the city that I ventured into the nearby park for a break and a coffee.

I pressed the buzzer of the terrace house, which I noticed had undergone some renovation judging by its smart exterior and the plantation shutters in the street-facing windows. I heard the bark of a dog from inside as a young woman opened the door, and a border collie came up beside her, softly growling protectively.

'Excuse me,’ I said as I held the book. ‘I sat on a bench in the park last weekend and had a delightful conversation with an elderly man who left his book behind.’ I handed the young lady the book. She looked at me with a puzzled expression as she took the book. “I found his address inside’ I said as I showed her the envelope I had kept aside.

She looked at it, saying, ‘That’s strange. This is my Dad’s address and his name on the envelope, and this may be his book, as he was an avid reader and we gave many of his books to a second-hand bookshop after he died some years ago; he couldn’t have been the same man that you met in the park.’

I am sorry to have bothered you.”I replied, feeling it would not be appropriate to go into any detail about my association with her home, but needed to know one thing.

‘Before I go, could I ask your dog’s name please?’ ‘Yes, sure, her name is Bonnie, ’ she replied as she turned to close the door.