[I witnessed this incident in a store near here. This is what I wrote about it when I found out the man had died.]

A little man in town died recently. I don’t know his name but he and his wife have a son who runs a business in the next town. I had seen them in the store last week, the little man moving slowly, not out of care or doubt but due to the fact that he could not move any faster. He was perhaps in his early seventies with a thin, dull face and slow eyes. He slouched forward noticeably at the shoulders as if from the effort of having to move. His wife took from his hands a package of beef jerky which he had picked up to purchase and put it back on the rack. “You don’t want this,” she announced, and they proceeded to check out. She had newly coifed, curly white hair and a round face carved with lines. Her face was like much of the American West, covered with dry washes everywhere, arid, monochrome, expressionless.

As we were headed for my truck, my companion commented about the old man. “He looks like he’s about to cash it in,” my friend said. Less than a week later, the old man was dead.

Now, in the mornings when I jog past the old man’s house, I’ll think of him trying to buy that beef jerky. Perhaps it would have been his last pleasure before leaving this earth. A little beef jerky doesn’t seem like too much to want. His tastes were simple, manly, unobtrusive, a small measure of satisfaction for a life well lived, despite his wife.