Mr. Leech

I recently thought about an old man who lived in my neighborhood when I was a child. Mr. Leech was tall and very slender. He had a grim expression, and I was actually rather afraid of him, but he would come by from time to time to talk with my neighbors.

It's difficult for children to judge the age of adults, but Mr. Leech seemed to be significantly older than my grandparents. I'm guessing that he was born in the 1870s. He would have known people who had fought in the American Civil War, probably a number of them. He would have been nearly 40 at the beginning of WWI and 70 by the end of WWII. He was an adult when the Wright brothers completed their first powered flight. Mr. Leech was a living monument of history, and yet here he was in the 1960s, big as life, chatting with my neighbors.

My own life has thankfully grown quite long. Combine my lifespan with that of Mr. Leech, and together we have lived through nearly 150 years of history. Add a third person, some elderly man or woman whom Mr. Leech knew in his childhood, and the span reaches back to the dawn of the American Republic.

The next time you see an elderly person talking to a small child, think about how much history the two of them might live through.