INTRODUCTION to Old Man and Women

Thomas Henry Huxley acknowledged his mother in his brief autobiography:

“My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic temperament, and possessed of the most piercing black eyes I have ever saw in a woman’s head. With no more education than other women of the middle classes in her day, she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most distinguishing characteristic, however, was her extreme rapidity of thought. If one ventured to suggest that she had not taken much time to arrive at any conclusion, she would say, ‘I cannot help it, things flash across me.’ That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full strength; it has often stood me in good stead; it has sometimes played me sad tricks; and it has always been a danger. But after all, if my time were to come over again, there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my inheritance of mother wit.” (de Beer, 1983, 101)

 Truths grow, mutate, and scatter in coffee shops but you have to be alert for them. Roaming therapists and their clients, job-seekers, tutors, advisers, first date interviewers, single women and girl-watchers, Internet addicts, young mothers with children, and people who read the magazines without paying for them . . . all linger in a café where most anything might be shared over a cup of latté, particularly when you talk with a source like Old Doc.

I arranged his stories the way that I once did sculpture in college: I found interesting pieces of “stuff” and cut, shaped, tacked, taped, and glued them to other pieces of stuff, whether cardboard, wood, or metal. My teacher said that I was “one of the best” but he couldn’t be sure that I was in control of everything and asked me to simplify my work. It’s nearly fifty years later. I still can’t take his advice. I clutter what I make and when I write a story, the delete key is my neglected best friend.

When I pasted Old Doc’s stories together, I also put aside about half of his material and distorted the plots and characters in what remained. These changes were done for privacy, a laugh, to make a point, or to let the characters have more fun. And some “facts” changed as they always do when the mind that wrote the story is not the mind that told it. Nonetheless, most times, a woman will swear that I’ve scribbled a story that is about just her.

She should remember, however, the professor who handed out personality profiles to his psychology class: Every student was impressed with the accuracy of his or her own information. Actually, every student was given the same information—a profile written by a maximum security inmate! Implication: you can’t tell if you’re in this book or not. A second implication: Our shared history describes our march out of the forest and across African grasslands and means that we, in many respects, will have substantially the same minds. A chapter about any one of us must be about every one of us. There are no coincidences.

Finally, women lie and I have been warned not to talk about it unless I can handle the “blowback.” I then explain the benefit to men that comes from a woman’s lie. Men are, after all, more of nature’s experiment than is true for women. When women “mother us” they are trying to correct how we men express our DNA and they do it from our conception until they cry at our funeral. A woman’s lies can be seen as altruistic and helpful not only to herself but also to her sons, lovers, and family rather than as a reason to send her down to hell…

Frank X. Craig,

October 17, 2011