04 August 2007

Old Fogey



It is the first Saturday of the month, and naturally I woke a little earlier than normal for a weekend. The big monthly swap meet is this morning, and I want to see what is heaped up in the parking stalls at the public garage before the selection is too picked-over.

When I was newly separated from the Ex, I did a lot of my shopping there for the basic things I needed, starting out again. Old tables, kitchenware cast off by others. I once found a cast-iron fry pan I still use for baking in the oven, and for a time was the only thing on my rented stove.

I don't need anything in particular, which is an excellent confluence in affairs, since in fact I don't have any money. I am living in negative money-land again, which is an odd and unsettling place to be after all these years of working. I won't bore you with that mess, not this morning. It is going to be too hot today, and maybe there will be time later, down by the pool when we can talk over something cool.

You do what you have to do. That is walking along the rows of cars at the swap meet is so life-affirming. Once a month they disgorge an eclectic mix of objects from other people's broken lives that is oddly uplifting. Disaster and death comes to us all in time, and is just part of the process. The swap meet is not London's Portobello Road, mind you. That flea market has the attic of the Empire to sort trough. But ours is just fine for a local event.

The problem- or at least one of them- is that I am seeing so much old junk that I either once owned or bought new.

The older things- the harvest of the War generation and those that came before- has a certain pre-plastic permanence. The tables that are covered with eight-track tapes, or battered Beta camcorders are just jarring. Maybe there is a currency for that media junk, but I am already swimming in non-compatible technology. Who on earth can sit down and watch life again in real time? That is what is so precious about the old home movies: Christmas 1955 in twenty seconds. Just right.

The times had an article about saving old analogue tapes to digital format, a requirement to save all those memories before they wind up unreadable, more plastic junk on a table at the swap meet: Life's Precious Moments at a buck for the lot.

I found some seven-inch floppy discs in one of the boxes that floats through space and time after me, and some five-inchers, and a sea of the little plastic 1.44 Megabyte discs that were so cool when new, and two boxes of Zip drive cartridges. I have no idea what is on them or where to find the drive to look inside for files that must have been important sometime.

I have a book I wrote, long ago, contained on some of them. I may as well have written it and sealed the pages in bottles to cast into the sea.

I suppose that is what defines the term “Fogey:” being overcome by the querulous feeling that the world has come unstuck from rightness and is wobbling off to disaster.

I am an Old Fogey these days. I am painfully aware of it at the pool, being somewhere more than halfway between the age of Andre the vibrant Czech lifeguard and the old woman with the deep wrinkles and the Esther Williams swim-cap. The term is familiar, in more than one context. In popular culture it describes someone old fashioned and out of touch with modern ideals.

I have no idea what those might be anymore. When I first heard the term, a “fogey” referred to an advance of military pay used to pay the expenses of dragging your ass to a new duty station, a feat never fully reimbursed by the government. It was also known as a “dead horse,” since that is exactly what you purchased in exchange for your future.

Once, two centuries ago, an “Old Fogey” was a nickname for an invalid, wounded soldier. One school says it is derived from the French word “fougeux,” meaning “fierce” or “fiery.” I like that one, since it implies passion. There is another opinion, that it is derived with the German word “vogt,” for Guard, or protector. 

I don't know what the truth might be, but it is certain that it is marshal in origin. The most authoritative use is from the Jamieson Scottish Dictionary, which would have included popular uses from the veterans of Iron Duke Wellington's army that beat the French and were allied, for a time, with the Germans.

That useage applied to the “invalid or garrison soldier,'' as typified by the resident's of the Fogie's Hospital, also known as the Royal Hospital at Dublin. They were known as Fogies due to their attempt to combat physical and mental disintegration by means of rigidity of habit and schedule.

So, it is the first Saturday of the month. As an old military man, I know where I have to go and what I must do. Which is to wander through the heaped wreckage of an age and look upon it with wonder. As a Fogey, it is my duty.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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