Old Guys Rule

Guarding the gate to
Old Dubrovnik.

An old man who had been eying Kellie from across the aisle walked up to her as she was examining melons in the produce section of a supermarket. She’s been a bit wary of older men ever since an uncomfortable encounter she had with an elderly gentleman in Croatia back in 2009. Kellie had been standing near the eastern gate in the stone wall that ringed the old city of Dubrovnik, gawking at the guard protecting the city entrance, when an old man ambled up to her and began speaking. Not knowing Croatian, Kellie could’t understand a thing he said, but his words were soft and gentle, and she smiled and nodded while struggling to comprehend his message. Kellie said it felt like a farther-daughter moment – right up to the point where he reached out and grabbed a handful of breast. “Nooooo!” Kellie shrieked.

“No?” replied the gentleman, obviously surprised by Kellie’s sudden uncooperativeness.  Apparently, all that Croatian gibberish was a polite request to cop a feel and he obviously interpreted Kellie’s smile and head nodding as permission to squeeze the fruit.

Understandably, the approach of another old geezer at a Walmart Supercenter trigged a post traumatic flashback to that misunderstanding along the Adriatic Coast. Fearful of getting her melons molested again, she withdrew slowly as he neared.

“Excuse me,” he declared, “you’re a woman. You’ll know the answer to this: What is chicken broth?” Relieved that he spoke English and wasn’t a pervert, Kellie delivered a dissertation on chicken broth and showed him a can of the stuff that she had already placed in her cart. He thanked her, explaining that his doctor had recently put him on a new diet and he was shopping for the necessary ingredients for the first time. He showed Kellie his shopping list. That’s where the conversation should have ended. It didn’t. Kellie immediately recognized that the gentleman had been placed on a BRAT diet – bananas, rice, apple sauce and toast – or as Kellie loudly exclaimed, “That’s the diarrhea diet!” 

Relieved that he had finally found a compassionate female who understood his pain, he spewed out a searing tale of gastrointestinal distress, describing the frequency, urgency and consistency of his bowel movements during the previous 24 hours. Queasy and nauseated by the visual image forming in her mind’s eye, Kellie looked around at the fresh fruits and vegetables and wondered how much of it he had touched and whether or not he had washed his hands. She managed to slip away, omitting the obligatory, “Nice to meet you,” and wondering if she should keep the pair of cantaloupes that had attracted the old man's attention in the first place.

I'm now beginning to understand why Kellie pulls away from me at times: I’m getting older, I enjoy grabbing a handful of boobie every now and then, and I love to regale her with after action reports from my bathroom bombing runs.