Being a lonely old curmudgeon in old-time Phoenix


It's Christmastime, and I live in the Phoenix area, so my mind is both wandering back to a glorious childhood surrounded by wonderful and generous people, and also to lonely old curmudgeons, of which Phoenix has always had quite a few.

I really don't recall reading Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", but I know the story well, and of course I know the character of Scrooge, who was the ultimate in lonely old curmudgeons. And today I'd like to see how people get there, as I really don't recall many lonely young curmudgeons, although I'm sure that they exist. My best guess is that people get to that stage slowly, over time, becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way that the world treats them, and suspicious of people's motives.

Let's spin the wheel on the way back machine, and time travel to Phoenix in the 1890s. We're standing on a balcony looking north on Central at Washington. That's the First National Bank Building there on the right, where some people keep their money, but not a lonely old curmudgeon. His money would be right there with him, stacked up in gold. And before you wonder if that's safe, rest assured that a lonely old curmudgeon would be sure to keep plenty of firepower around him, probably in addition to the gun he used during the War of the Rebellion, or the War of the States, or the Civil War, or whatever he called it, and plenty of hunting rifles. His vision may be too blurry to see much, but he could still point at the door and squeeze a trigger. He might even have his grandpappy's old breech-loader, just to be sure!

I'm picturing that mostly the old lonely curmudgeon would be left alone, and the only difficult time would be Christmastime, when people would go out of their way to greet him, say Merry Christmas on the street, maybe ask him to donate to the poor. This would be would he would need to do his most ferocious snarl, and quite possibly say, "Bah, humbug!" which would have still been a popular expression in the 1890s, as humbug would mean about the same as "BS" would today, or "just a bunch of nonsense!" if you prefer. A real lonely old curmudgeon would always see selfish and underhanded things in just about everything that people did, especially gift-giving, and charity.

My heart does go out to lonely old curmudgeons, and I often wonder what in their life led them to that place. Speaking for myself, I often worried that I would reach in a point where no one else mattered to me but myself, and my dog. I know that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference, and I worried that I would become indifferent, and disinterested in the people around me, becoming more and more emotionally sheltered, but I'm happy to say that it didn't happen to me. I didn't need the ghost of Christmas past, present, and future to visit me, all I needed was the internet, which reminded me that there is a big wonderful world out there filled with wonderful and generous people.

Merry Christmas!
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