But there's another leap forward, a new amenity for our social life. I've often mentioned the General Store's Geezer Bench, which gives old guys a place to roost while thinking dark thoughts about the world and the passing traffic. Well, there's now a second bench, just an easy bunt to the east, near the Harmony House ramp. The other day I saw, lounging comfortably there, a portly old gent with a beard as handsome as Santa's. If I hadn't been rushing off somewhere, I'd have pulled over, sat down, and asked for his world views.

That's because I'm about to advance in my own Geezer status. With my fiftieth high school reunion in just a few days, I'll be moving from Aspiring Geezer to Geezer, Junior Grade. That entitles me to startle tourists by saying the world is shot plumb to hell, and to scowl and shake my fist at trucks speeding through our Four Corners. I've been looking forward to that.

Geezerdom, you see, is sort of the male equivalent to the more genteel Red Hat Ladies, aging women who've declared their independence of convention and who will dress and speak as they damned well please. Hurray for them, I say. Their model ought to be Fly Creek's Lady Ostapeck, who's lived that sort of freedom for decades and is, incomparably, her own woman.

Of course there are degrees among the Red Hat Ladies. They range from refreshing anarchists to women who've joined up just to socialize and wear purple and red. There's that sort of range in Geezerdom, too, but also a big difference: You don't choose to sign up for the Geezer crew; you're shanghaied aboard by age.

And the subsets among us? Well, my favorite remains the old Farm Geezers. You can still see them at the Welch Livestock Auction in West Edmeston, and they used to haunt Empire Auctions in Oneonta before it got closed and bulldozed.

A classic Farm Geezer has no more than four teeth. He's literally thin as a rail; he and a locust post will cast the same shadow. He's at least eighty and wears a flannel shirt so faded you can tell it's plaid but can't be sure about the colors. And in cold weather he might wear a leather bomber jacket, cracked and scuffed, his proud possession since the Air Force was still the Army Air Corps.

Farm Geezers are mostly shy, but each has at least one good story-the big fire, the silo collapse, the suicide. Watch for them at farm sales, keeping to themselves, wandering from table to table. They stop to finger bridles or hames-and recall, I imagine, wrestling with a horse-drawn plow, absorbing the wrenching jolt as the blade hit a rock or twisted around one.

By rights, my old buddy Arrie Hecox should have been a pure Farm Geezer, but he was really a mixed breed. Most of Arrie was out of another Geezer subspecies, the Old Grump. That was understandable. Arrie was a devout contrarian his whole life. He didn't just march to a diffferent drummer. Arrie was his own percussion section-bass drums, snares, the works.

As an Old Grump, for instance, Arrie was never satisfied by any preacher-never found one that aligned with his own vivid scriptural interpretations. And so he'd hunker down in a local church for some weeks or months, but end up giving up on the place and moving on. To Pastor Doug Deer's great credit, Arrie was still with Cooperstown Baptist up to his death. But Doug says he's well aware that, in Arrie's mind, he was on probation.

And, as a true Old Grump, Arrie was also "agin the gumment." The rule of law wasn't for him. He told me once about an escaped criminal who'd hid out for weeks in the Schuyler Lake Cemetery. "Wished I'd a known he was there!" Arrie said. "I'd a took him some food."

My West Texas friend Johnny Elma Anderson (herself a free spirit) sent me a clipping about a Texas bank robber that Arrie would have gladly harbored, too. A fellow Old Grump, Red Rountree had held a grudge of many decades against banks. At age 87 he started revenging himself.

His first bank robbery was in Biloxi. But, making his slow escape on foot, the old man was overtaken and arrested. He was given three years' probation and thrown out of Mississippi.

While he was awaiting sentencing, though, he shared a cell with a real bank robber who told him how to do the job right. And in less than a year Red was back at it, in Pensacola, Florida. This time he got almost across the parking lot to his idling pickup before two customers tackled him. A less sympathetic judge gave him three years. He was the oldest inmate in the Florida prison system.

On release he was sent back home to Texas. Relatives tried to make a pleasant home for him, settled him into a nice travel-trailer, helped him buy an old Buick to get around in. But in a couple of months Red drove the Buick to Abilene and robbed another bank. Again he proved better at robbing than getaway. This time he's in for twelve years. At age 92.

I wish could share that story with Arrie, my own Old Grump. But maybe it's just as well. Red Rountree is his kind of guy. Arrie might have shipped him a cake with a file in it.

Jim Atwell lives in and views life from Fly Creek. He can be found on the web at JimAtwell.com.