Problems, Problems

You sat. Albert made tea the way he'd once made cranes safe, with elaborate unhurried care, and talked: thirty-one years on the quay when it teemed, the lorries and the shouting, the day the last ship left. "When you get old," he said, "you're moved from the register of men to the register of problems. Eight times this year they've assessed me. Nobody asked what I know about the tide."

He told you about the spring, when he'd said he could hear the lamps hum. "The old sodium ones. They do hum. The new ones don't. They wrote 'hallucinations'. They'd rather note my ears than their lamps."