I was in the kitchen and for the past twenty minutes I’d been trying to pump up my wife’s bicycle tire with a tiny hand-held pump I’d bought for £5 earlier in the week.
My wife had ignored my advice to wait for me and had uncapped the valve of the slightly underinflated tire and prepared to pump it. Naturally, it was dead flat in ten seconds.
It was not the Shrader valve it had first appeared to be. It was in fact a Presta valve with an adaptor. So, I’d adjusted the pump for that and had been pumping like a madman. Fifty years before I’d been a bike mechanic in New York. I’d had muscle then, and wind. And, I knew how.
Now, I was blown. My arms were tired, and the tire had stubbornly refused to take in any air. Just as my wife re-entered the room I cut my hand on the valve which, I saw, was broken. There was no pin/stem to regulate the flow and every pound of air I’d pumped in had immediately fled the tube.
AI adaptation of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man created using ChatGPT and GeminiAI.
I was not happy. I was bleeding and my temper’s fuse was dangerously near the dynamite.
But, when we bump into one another we become densely packed — incredibly close and tightly bonded. We become something else, something separate from our individual selves, something weightier and far more impactful. And, in my view anyway, these tight bonds among men are, like water, a critical condition for life.
Photo by Ling Tang.
And then I thought — though it’s probably taking the analogy too far — that in this condensed and liquid form we men also advance, as does water, in waves. Each successive generation procedes from a tiny ripple to form a tall, imposing, and powerful crest that ends by breaking — with tremendous impact — on the beach. With with a sighing, foaming whisper, it recedes.
And right there, between crest and backwash, lies a period when older men, even as they recede, may call to those arising in their wake, using their own amassed wisdom to push the oncoming combers upwards to greater height and power before they, too, shall fall.
There will always be much we older men do not know — for example, why water is heavier than its component gases. Yet, at least we can impart what wisdom and force we have gained, giving all that we can of ourselves to assist the onrushing swell.
About the Author
Dan Kempner is the Executive Editor of MDI Legacy Magazine. He is based in Sheffield, England, where he lives, works, writes, and cultivates a tiny pear tree. He is very happily married
and has two young daughters.
A Word on the Frontispiece
The Frontispiece is an adaptation of Hokusai’s The Great Wave, plate 1 in the series 36 Views of Mt. Fuji. It was created using Gemini and ChatGPT AI.
A Word on the Background Image
Background image by Olga Deeva.
The original has been tinted and colorized using MSWord AI Tools.
