When I was a young kid, I had a step father who used to be a sailor. I always tell my mother I remember sitting on the kitchen table watching a taxi pull up, and he'd get out and come in and then he was living with us. She says it didn't happen like that, but that's how I remember it.
I loved him. He was a man's man. He had tattoos - on of a flying fish on his arm, a whale right above his pubes, and a propeller on his butt cheek. He'd tell stories of the fighters on the docks of Rotterdam, the whores of Hong Kong that would do anything to trick the sailors, and how some of the new guys would puke for days and days when they first got on the ship. I listened, blue eyed and enthralled, and tried to imagine doing all these things myself.
He and my mother split up when I was about 15, maybe 16, and then I didn't really see him until I was about 34. I'd inherited an old house, moved my little family into it, and lost my job and my biological father all within 3 months. I was in a bit of a rough spot, and he offered to help me fix the place up. I was soft, and didn't know much, and he was harder and full of knowledge. I needed that.
One day we started working at 7 in the morning. He must have been about 68 years old then. Stringy, sinewy, one of the old school guys. He'd never lifted weights, never worked out, he'd just always worked. From early morning till late evening, he loved working. Building, carrying, fixing. Being useful.
As I said, we started early. We were unloading plaster boards and 2 by 8s, a whole truck had arrived. We carried that shit for hours, and I was exhausted.
I asked him - "Aren't you tired?"
He answered me: "Yes." and kept going.
So I said, "You wanna take a break?"
He replied: "No, not yet."
I was pissed, but since he was helping me, I couldn't say anything, and just kept going with him. A while later, as we were finishing up, I asked him why he didn't want to take a break, and he told me:
I take a break when I'm done.
I just figured he was a hardass, and didn't really think much more about it then. I've realized later that he was trying to teach me a lesson, without moralizing or telling me how to live my life. He didn't want to sit down, because he knew it would be hard getting back up. He felt tired, but he kept going. He had decided that he was a hard man, and he wasn't going to go soft until he absolutely had to. I never knew anyone who could work like him. I think about that a lot.
Another man I think about often is a WW2 veteran who visited us at the end of high school. I was 17, maybe 18, and he came to talk about the war. We were all soft and had a glaring lack of knowledge about actual hardship. We'd had decent lives - some poor, some rich, but all of us safe and warm. So he came into our class room, a big man even in his mid 80s. I liked him, he had kind eyes and that mischievous gleam of true wit in his eyes.
He'd been with the resistance. They worked to sabotage the Germans right under their own eyes. They're national heroes, always remembered with reverence. He told us many things, about how they set fire to civic offices to destroy documents about citizens, how they sank ships in the harbor, and how they hid people they knew the Germans wanted to get their hands on. It was exciting stuff, and he told it with such ease, like it was something anyone could do.
There was one thing I've never forgotten. He'd been part of some mission, I don't remember what or why, but after it was done, he had to flee into the forest and mountains. He was alone, it was pitch black, and the enemy was on his trail. All he had - I remember this part so vividly, for some reason or other it is etched into me - was a chicken in his backpack. And he told it like it wasn't a big problem. It was just how it was right then, and he had to deal with that.
It didn't help him to worry about not having enough food, or that he didn't have enough clothes on, because that was just how it was. He had to be hard. He had to keep running, running, walking, crawling, hiding and running. He had to get to the Swedish border. There was no option of stopping to have a rest or light a fire to warm up, because if he did, he'd likely be captured, tortured, perhaps killed. And all this he told with such ease, such gentleness. They were just facts of the situation, and he just dealt with them as best he could. He didn't seem to think of himself as especially hard, or tough, or manly. He'd just done the things he had to do, and kept doing the things he had to do.
I think that's the definition of old man grit, as I see it now. As I age, I just have to do the damn things that need to be done. I need to lift weights, because if I don't I soften up and die. I need to run in the forest, because if I don't, I get gassed walking up the stairs. When I don't feel like it, I need to simply stand up, go out, do the thing that has to be done.
Being a hard man is a mental challenge. Lifting the weight, running the trail, scaling the obstacle - that's just the work that comes after the actual challenge has been overcome.
