The old man and the Small Boy

I see the same elderly gentleman most mornings. His morning constitutional seems to coincide with the end of Small Boy's morning nap, so from Small Boy's window I see him walking past on the street below. He carries a walking stick and wears a cap, and looks the way I imagine James Cromwell might look at eighty, although he's not nearly so tall. Once he stopped and had a brief, animated conversation with a woman in her fifties. The window was closed, so at first I could not tell if it was a conversation or something a bit less friendly, but the woman occasionally patted his forearm and they shook hands upon parting. I imagine he has lived in this quartier for decades - Swiss people tend to stay put - and is well known to other long-term residents. I imagine his wife passed on a decade ago. I imagine he looks over at our modern building - a bit cold, a bit sterile perhaps - and shakes his head. I imagine it pleases him, however, that so many families with young children have moved in. I imagine he speaks a Dialekt that resembles my father-in-law's - an older vocabulary, somehow more difficult to understand, more foreign - more than my husband's. I imagine when he returns home from his walk - he lives on the first floor and although his building has a lift he insists on walking the stairs - he drinks a cup of coffee. I imagine he is quietly satisfied with his life.

And then I look at my boy, with his whole life still stretching out before him, so eager to get on with it already!, to crawl, to walk, finally to run boldly into his future and never look back, and I think that this is what I want for him above all: At the end of his life to be quietly satisfied with it.