why, when I catch the bus, do I share it with old women and not with old men? are the old men still asleep or are they already at the shops? did they walk? did they drive? one of my grandfathers would only walk into town, walk from balmoral to the city and back again in three hours. when he died of a heart attack fishing on the rocks, the doctor refused to go down to the beach, and the men who found him had to carry him up to the road. once I dreamed I carried him on my back through a desert. because he was dead he could no longer walk. I am not sure, in a heart attack, if the heart attacks or is attacked, is attack fishing now quietly with the tide, or perhaps the old men are already dead. perhaps they are driving regardless, like my other grandfather, who nearly died when, functionally blind with glaucoma, he drove into a sheep, and who nearly died when his ride-on mower rolled over on top of him at the bottom of a slope where very long grass kept on growing.