Ol' Joe Rembrandt

His friends called him the 'Hundred year man'.  It didn't matter where Ol' Joe Rembrandt went people always ended up calling him that.

Joe moved around.  He would stay in a place long enough for everyone to get to know.  For the pubs to call him a 'regular', for the children to call him 'Old Man Rembrandt', and for his friends to call him 'The Hundred year man'.

Then, Joe would leave.  There were always muttered reasons, like family, or for a change, or the town was getting to him.  Sometimes the gossip would flare up like 'It's trouble with the mill mans daughter', or 'with the Doctor's son', or even 'He's going for a quiet place to die'.

And sometimes the towns would just let him float on out with ease, until someone says at the dinner table or the local brewer “Whatever happened to ol' man Rembrandt?”  And no one would give a right answer.  Two things were always certain to his friends:  He ain't dead, and he ain't ever comin' back”.

When he arrived at Norwhich he admitted to to living some sixty-seven years.  He stayed there for twenty-some before drifting to some pit in Scotland “Looking to retire at sixty” he said.

No one rightly knew what age he was, just that as they got older he hardly changed.  He looked old, but not old.

Folks come up with all kinds of reasons, the kinds of reasons we make up in our head that we don't logically believe, but make us feel better and lays the matter to rest in our minds.  

So long as Joe stayed in a town it felt like nothing change.  The kids would grow up and get jobs close to home.  Buildings were preserved instead of torn down and replaced with new ones.

People would grow up with Joe their whole life saying they knew everything about him.  But get two men from two different towns claiming to know him and the only two things they could agree on were the name, and that it must be a different Joe Rembrandt!  It was like each town and village had their own, so believing your “Joe Rembrandt” elsewhere broke some kind of un-uttered tradition.

One thing people often did remember was he smoked.  But how and what he smoked changed from one town to the next.

In a village near Bude he was always with his Pipe, tobacco so dark and cakey it left a long con trail.  In Berwick near the borders it was Cigars.  In Melrose, weed and ciggs.  He smoked when he felt like it.  When it was fashionable.  When it was considered healthy, when it was discovered unhealthy.  When it was cool, when it was frowned upon.  When in and out of doors.  With people, with no one.

Doing anything that much is unhealthy, folk would tell him as much too.  But he would wave them off with a “bah”, light another, keep wheelin his burrow.  Keep guiding his Dartmoor pony.  Keep riding his bike.  Keep driving his old rickety 67 VW Beetle (Which he undoubtedly bought brand new some forty years before).  And as he would go folks who knew him would laugh, and too their friends say “There goes ol' Joe Rembrandt, the Hundred year man”.

Or course, they were wrong about the age.