The Old Man and the slow lane: "Stop-n-Go" by Michael Parker

There are certain stories that have a tendency to remind me how every narrative doesn't just tell a story, it performs an act. Often more than one act. It's easier to notice in a poem, perhaps, because some poems carry the act they are performing within the name of the type of poem they are: elegy, lament, threnody, ode, aubade, ballad, etc. These types of poems announce that they are there to praise, to remember, to criticize, to call to action, and so on. But stories can do the same things. It's just harder to notice. Poetry is broadly divided into the narrative and the lyrical, and the actions performed by narrative poems tend to be just what they sound like: to tell a story. Although a narrative poem can be as thematically complex as a lyrical one, we don't often think of a narrative poem as performing as many different actions, and we carry this belief over to thinking that all stories are there to do the same action--tell a story.

But Michael Parker's "Stop-n-Go" does seem to be performing an action. To use the language of visual art, it is painting a portrait. It is a very short story, taking perhaps five minutes to read (ten if you're me and you get distracted easily). The story is book-ended by a typical portrait of an old man. He is confused by the world he now lives in: "...he doesn't understand a good three-quarters of the things he hears people say. Commercials on television perplex him." At story's end, he is taking out his feelings of confusion and anger on the world around him, driving slowly on purpose to the grocery store and making traffic back up behind him, reveling in how he is inconveniencing all these people "in a hurry, eager to get to that someplace, he doesn't know where or care, somebody told them they needed to be."

There's not much surprising there. It's kind of a high-brow version of a comedian's cheap laugh at the aged, if anything. But in between the beginning and the middle, the old man thinks back to his time in World War Two. There are two major events in the war that come to him. First, he was wounded badly in the night, and he wasn't sure if he would bleed to death first or freeze to death. He was picked up by "some old boy" and taken to a medic. The old boy then did what fighting men and women are still taught to do with a hypothermia case today--he stripped down and got inside a sleeping bag with him.

The second thing he remembers is the liberation of Dachau. The story elides everything he saw there but one, which is how the Roma families outside the gate refused to leave after they were set free. One place was as good as another to them, so they stayed in the shadow of the place they had recently almost died.

You could say the story's theme is something like the meme I've seen a few versions of on social media:

OR...

That might be part of it, but that's not all of what this story's quick drawing of the old man is about. The man is struggling to interpret the world of today, but he's also still stuck trying to decipher the meaning of events from long ago. These were the central events of forming his adult psyche, and they happened when he wasn't at all ready for them. There is a hint of an unresolved homo-erotic feeling for the "old boy" who rescued him: "It felt like a sin to still retain the memory of the roughness of the boy's cheek when in the night it grazed the back of his neck but this wasn't thing, nor was getting shot at and lying alone in the cold and dark trying to choose which way to die."

The old man compares the feeling of  lying next to the old boy to the feeling of lying next to his wife, but I don't think the main point is that he repressed homosexual urges his whole life. It's more that it was so unexpected to find something so gentle and tender coming from a man lying next to him in the middle of the most hellish thing he ever experienced. The boy was "all muscle and hairy," and so the feeling of lying next to him should have been less confusing, more obviously distasteful. But here the old man is, decades later, thinking that this isn't how it felt, and that's hard for him to parse. We don't have to think of the old man as secretly gay to imagine that he would be confused to realize that he could feel something for a man that was even comparable to the feelings he felt for his wife.

I don't think he's mean at the end because he repressed homosexuality his whole life. That's a possible reading, but I think it's equally justifiable and probably more interesting to think of him as just not being able to reconcile the cruelty and the sweetness of the world.

Portraits are often intentionally vague, forcing the viewer to make a series of choices in how to read the lines on the face or the intention in a gesture. In a moment of viewing and without any other information, we are asked to determine if we like this person in the painting. That's how this story treats its subject. Whether we sympathize with a man and find ourselves reconsidering our own impatience with the elderly or we find him contemptible for the way he has chosen to side with spite over sweetness, we are at least realizing there is an interiority and an agency we don't normally ascribe to the old guy who holds up traffic. Whether we're on his side or not, the important thing the story accomplishes is to make us consider the choices of a person whose actions do not normally concern us.