Geezers throughout the nation

We were talking about geezers. Our particular group is not  much different, I suppose, than thousands of others across the country.
One time, Frosty and I spent the night in Missouri, crossed over the Iowa line the next morning, and stopped in the charming town of Winterset, the county seat of Madison County, you know, the one with the bridges. It’s also where John Wayne was born.
I stopped at the drug store and went in. Nobody was up front. In a moment, a lady in the back hollered, “What do  you need, hon?”  I told her I just needed some film. She said, “Why, just go behind the counter there and get what you need. I’ll be up there in a minute.”
What she was doing was pouring coffee for a bunch of … geezers. Yeah, back in one corner of the store was a little place for eating or drinking coffee. There they were. Hmmm, I thought, they look just about like our geezers. I wished I had more time to spend with them.
Or, have you ever been to West Branch, Iowa?  Probably not. There ain’t  that much to see there. Wait, I take that back. West Branch is the hometown of President Herbert Hoover, and they have kept the little downtown area like it was when he was there. Very nice, even for a yaller dog. There’s a small motel there, right in the edge of a corn field. The only eating place in town is a McDonald’s, across the highway from the carefully preserved downtown area.
We walked over to get us a little breakfast, and there, gathered at a couple of tables in a back corner, were a bunch of geezers. I swear, I don’t believe they’d have raised an eyebrow if I had joined them. They looked just like our geezers; well, maybe not like Jones or Pratt. Jones might have been offended by some rather coarse talk. He, after all, was very sensitive about proper English and such. He said the only time he was ever scolded was for singing too loud in the choir.
But you get the idea. The world is full of geezers.
All right, take another example. We were coming straight down the middle of Vermont. We stopped for breakfast at a lovely little town, which is a busy  ski resort town in the winter. But this was late summer. I noticed the pick-ups parked in the parking lot, some of them covered with rust. The waitress was very friendly, asking us about that far away place called Alabama.
But what I noticed most was the group in the back corner. With just a little imagination, I could see, oh, Wells, with a new  little car toy, or Jones needling Pratt about the old mill days or the colonel for using our taxpayer money. Could have been us, except so many of ours are gone.
Ours may be just about like thousands of other groups of old men; but on second thought, not too many groups have a retired state Supreme Court Justice, plus a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, and a man who knows more about snakes than anybody in the country, and Husky, the Squire of Roamer’s Roost, and somebody who doesn’t say much, a rarity.
However, there’s a whole bunch of empty seats in our Geezer meeting place, but we press on.
Mrs. S, was that nice? What you called us? Tch, tch, tch. I won’t even use the initials. Come to think of it, we’re part of a worldwide organization. Hooray for us.
Bob Sanders is a veteran local radio personality and author. He can be reached at bobbypsanders@gmail.com.