Life of Boredom

Beyond the bandaged battle-scared physique of time, I see that old man. Enfeebled from his own eighty-four years of struggle against our common and constant enemy, he walked into the courthouse straight as a plum line, though sometimes fluttered off center by the winds of age. I see him bone thin and bone hard, with his thick butcher’s hands, the backs rippled with veins and the fingers curved with a tinge of arthritis There is palsy, too, and when these hands grip the wooden arms of the courthouse chair, his legs shake lowering him to sit.

It’s that spring of 1893 in the winter of his life, he doesn’t know what lies ahead, as I know from peeking around the shoulder of time. He wouldn’t care, of course. He’d still make this fight against the encroachment on his life. His head turns on a creaking neck to look at the opposing table where his sons sit. They do not turn to look at him. Llwellyn and Henry say he’s insane and they brought this trial to protect his property from himself. And to what ends do they protect it from him, he wonders? As he stares, he sees their mother’s visage wandering in ghostly semblance across their faces. Her name had been Jane Brinton Darlington and time, after only 38 years, silenced her count of seconds in 1854. Their last child, Clara, was born in 1853 and died that self-same year, and at the end of that next winter Jane followed her girl into the earth. And now old Daniel B. sits haunted by her features in the faces of loved adversaries.

A gavel bangs, a lawyer rises and time taps its fingers upon the bar. The trail moseys its way toward summer and at the end his lawyer rises to say, “Great God, is it insanity to become old? Is a man’s mind wrong because he is forgetful? The law on the subject says that a mere weakness of mind is not ground for a commission of insanity.” Daniel B. walked out of court as he had walked in, straight and unbowed, a sane man still.

News note: “Died. Meredith – In West Chester, June 5, 1895, Daniel B. Meredith, aged 87 years.”

He couldn’t escape the final verdict of time, but he did escape being sentenced to a life of boredom.