“Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.” — George Bernard Shaw
We Dineen kids were big fans of the 50’s – 60’s sitcom The Real McCoys. Grandpa Amos McCoy, played by the curmudgeonly Walter Brennan, was by far our favorite. Amos was a cantankerous old cuss, the patriarch often at odds with his grandson Luke, played by the affable Richard Crenna, and his perky wife Kate, played by Kathleen Nolan.
Grandpa Amos spoke is a high-pitched whine and grumbled about everything. In bib overalls and a tattered straw hat, he was skeptical of strangers and suspicious of anything new-fangled, preferring to use a plow pulled by a horse than any shiny red International Harvester tractor. He “roared like a lion but was gentle as a lamb, “so the theme song went, and in every episode the crusty geezer’d do a switcharoo to show his softer side.
To us kids, the best part about old Amos was not his voice or his temperament. It was his limp. He had a funny hitch to his giddy-up and hobbled along with his fists clenched, his elbows jutting sideways. We mimicked him endlessly. Our faces scrunched up into Amos-like wrinkles, we snapped at “young uns” to get out of our way as we hobbled across the living room.. What a hoot!
That hitch in his giddy-up? I’m not laughing anymore.
Not since I’ve become a little gimpy when a disc in my back went kaflooey. Sciatica led to a painful shuffle of my own, not untypical for those of us old enough to remember Grandpa McCoy himself. No wonder Amos was so cranky. Was he awake in the wee hours, writhing around on his mattress in pursuit of a comfortable position? Did his calves throb as he pushed that damned plow through the furrows in the north 40? Those porch steps that led to his rocking chair—did it seem like a climb up Everest?
Poor Amos! No trip to Urgent Care for x-rays and a dose of steroids. No visits to a physical therapist. No MRI to spot the cause of the lightning bolts down the leg, no epidural injections to zap the problem at its source.
Thanks to modern medicine and more importantly, access to it, my limp is less Amos-esque. The lightning bolts have trickled down to a manageable ache. I’m on my way to normalcy, fingers crossed.
Amos, I apologize for ever thinking your limp was funny. Life’s experiences have shed a new light on things, and I no longer think that a bum back is just a regular part of elderly decrepitude that needs to be tolerated.
And as for dismissing you as some old geezer, I apologize for that, too. A fun fact… Walter Brennan was sixty-three years of age when he starred in The Real McCoys.
Hello, Lamppost 