I once met a woman who’d known Billy the Kid, or so she said. She was a very old woman when I met her, consigned to a wheelchair and dappled with age. She had the hooked nose and collapsed mouth of a crone from a storybook, but she was kind and still eager to be liked. Though her voice quavered, her mind was sound, and she had arranged with the nursing home where she lived to be taken out each Wednesday night so she could attend a college class I taught called “The American West on Film.”
She got there early the first night of class, accompanied by an attendant. I was surprised to see a student her age, and I’m fairly sure I was patronizing in my attention to her. I was only thirty then, and the very elderly were an alien species to me. As the rest of the students filtered in and took their seats in the little auditorium, I knelt beside her wheelchair and asked her name. She bore the faint smell of the nursing home — a mixture of Betadine, urine, and BenGay — but she had also dabbed herself with perfume, and there were comb tracks through her thinning hair. She said her name was Frida, and that she was ninety-eight years old.
