My whole life elders have fascinated me. I don't know why that was but it was. As a child, I would seek our elders, stare at them, in awe, as they talked to me and stand in admiration of them. I remember questioning my fetish once, when I was very young. Was I going to be like them one day? Yes, I was, came the answer from my rational self. Would I want young people to acknowledge me when it was my turn to step into the world of antiquity. Yes, I would, my sensitive self replied. Would I want an audience that would be receptive to what I had to pass on to future generations? Yes, absolutely I would, said my inner self who deals with my sense of immortality. Other than my grandparents, my first conscious elder encounter was in my pre-teen years. After re-discovering our neighbor, Don Giuseppe, I didn't question anymore.

I never knew Don Giuseppe's last name and I guess, at the time, it didn't matter. All we kid's knew was that he was an old man, somewhere in his eighties, who had come to the United States from his native Sicily, who farmed his small plot of land across the road from us, who was widowed before we were born, who immaculately kept up his own home, inside and outside. I vividly remember seeing him active every day until his death at the age of ninety-five, when I was twenty-one.

My first verbal encounter with Don Giuseppe was the day he caught me stealing huge clusters of Concord grapes from his vines, which, in the summertime, formed a living fence around his property. It stayed beyond me how he knew I was there; he took that to his grave with him. Once he had said that he could smell me on his property, even when I would climb his Oxhart cherry tree to steal his prized, plump, ripe, purple cherries! He promised me that he wouldn't report my penchant for stealing to my mother if I would come over for one hour every day, in the afternoon, for a lesson in planting and cultivating plants. Reluctantly, I agreed.

By the end of that summer, I leaned about his native country, his life there and in our small town, how to prepare even the poorest soil for cultivation, how and when to plant, how to transplant, how to propagate plants by seeds, by cuttings, by grafting, how to harvest and how to preserve the harvest for future use. The next summer he gave me a small plot of land for my own use and coached me in the process. Along with his homilies of life, the education he gave me rivals any I would have gotten at a university level. The example he set for me, as a human being and as a blind man who successfully functioned in a seeing world, is a gift and legacy too valuable to calculate.

EDITOR'S NOTE:
This is the kick-off story of "Marty's "Octogenarian Club". We have opted to call it the "Octo Club". Contact him on site; http://www.4pointspress.com or direct your email to the Editor.