Growing older has its advantage

LaVerne Ard arrived at Sandy Bay with two pies and a dog that looked like a wharf rat that looked like it had been baptized with a hair dryer.

Ken Ard has a bulldog named Ugly. I don’t know what LaVerne called that wharf rat, but it was so ugly I bet he has to blindfold the fire hydrant. I thought it was one of Ole Scrap Iron’s biscuits until it barked.

The pies from Martha at Cain’s Barbecue were delicious. LaVerne and I are members of a mutual admiration society. We no longer receive our calories from a frying pan, but from a can.

Each day together, we get nine cans of liquid chalk casserole called Ensure. This beverage from purgatory will never replace the ribeyes at Outback. The product that keeps our motors running comes in an 8½ ounce can. Once inside my 81-year-old ghetto I call a body, it gives me the strength to grunt every hour on the hour. LaVerne says the taste don’t bother him.

All those Ards have retarded taste buds except when it comes to women. Martha and Peggy believed they were getting a Persian rug, but what they received was linoleum. Peggy was Joan of Arc. She married Attila the Hun. Martha was Mother Teresa. she ended up with the Lizard Man. LaVerne says Lyn Anderson is retiring in September from Lake View Baptist Church. That’s good news for the devil, bad news for the congregation. Lyn’s wife, Adrianne, is still in Fork.

LaVerne and Martha, Peggy and I still talk about our trip to Lake View and Fork, where the only thing better than the food was the hospitality.

LaVerne has a million stories. Some, like this column, are 90 percent BS. One of my favorites is about DeLance Poston, who practiced law in Johnsonville and is now retired in Charleston.

LaVerne’s first love was baseball. DeLance Poston was 6 feet 6 inches tall, had poor vision and could throw a baseball so hard it made diarrhea look like a slow poke. LaVerne was the catcher and DeLance was the pitcher.

One night in the misting rain in North Carolina, DeLance told LaVerne, “Don’t signal with your fingers, use your whole hand.”

DeLance was as wild as an alcoholic in a liquor store on payday. When it left his hand, it look like a beach ball.

When it arrived in LaVerne’s mitt, it was an M&M, and the noise it made sounded like a fireworks display. But sometimes you didn’t know which ZIP code that ball would end up in. Two old men who have been there and done that sit at Sandy Bay and recall the past.

Growing old has one advantage: you never have to do it again. We remember the things we could have when we were young. Now we don’t want them.

— Charlie Walker is a local newspaper columnist. He can be reached at P.O. Box 441, Kingstree, SC 29556.