The Times, they are a fading. . .

You'll smell the punch line a mile off, but I'll tell the story anyway. Can't help it.

My mother's 50th Normal School reunion was set for a local restaurant. When she got there, she was met by a smile from the maître d', who, when asked, directed Mom over to a far corner. "That'll be your group," she said, politely, I'm sure.

"Must be another bunch," Mom said, her confidence as obvious as her naivete. "Those women are too old."

The maître d', I'm sure, kept smiling.

Friend of mine met with his very first basketball team, 72-73, I believe, last weekend at a college reunion. That's them up top. I told him to be prepared--they weren't going to be kids. He's my age. Didn't need to be warned. He sent me a shot. Here the boys are.

Don't know why exactly, but I'm somewhere in the middle of The Big Sky, the first of a trilogy of novels from A. B. Guthrie, a novel that won the Pulitzer in 1950, to these guys--and me--a time that doesn't seem quite so terribly far away (I was two). 

More than anything else, The Big Sky is about the American west, it's endlessness, it's sheer beauty, and its grand appeal to the men--not women--who found it totally their domain, be they red or white. It's a novel with three central characters, one of whom, Summers, is on his homeward way. He can't help being affected by his age, accompanied as he is by Boone Cauldron, a kid out of Kentucky getting his first taste of the American frontier. Boone forever reminds Summers of what it's like to be young and the terminal sadness that accompanies the realization of what all will never be relived.  

The Big Sky is not woke. My guess is it would be a glorious read for anyone who loves Fox News, and buried somewhere behind the desk at the lib library. It's sexist, gross, and might well seem downright vile to, say, today's women's book clubs. I'm not recommending it to my wife.

But I can't help it--I love it, in great part because A. B. Guthrie spits out language that sometimes just plain sings. 

I don't need reunions to remind me about getting old, and I don't need Pulitzer Prize winners to tell me what it feels like. Maybe I shouldn't be reading The Big Sky--I don't know. After all, the disease is in me too--dang it, I'm aging.

But I stumbled on this yesterday. I can't help but love this.

Summers liked company, all right, and liked drinking and frolics as well as anybody, but in a quiet way, as if nothing that happened now was as important as what had gone before. It was age getting him, likely; a man was lucky if he didn't grow too old and have to think that the best of what was going to happen to him had already happened. God was mighty mean in some ways, letting a body get on to the point where he always hungered to turn back, making him know he wasn't the man he had been, making his bed cold but keeping in his mind the time when it wasn't. It was like a man was pushed backwards down hill, seeing the top getting farther from him every day, but always seeing it, always wishing he could go back. Sometimes God seemed pretty small. 

I listened to the audible.com novel about a year ago, heard only what played when I wasn't thinking about where I was walking or who walked by in the gym. When I finished it, I went to Amazon and bought a cheap, used copy because I told myself I might just want to read The Big Sky slowly sometime. Now I'm doing that, and lovin' it. 

So there, Father Time. Shelf that hourglass. Stick that scythe in some dark corner of the barn.  Maybe I got a few books in me yet before I join that bunch of old folks in the far corner of the restaurant.