I have to admit that old men--now that I am one myself--entertain me as much as they did when I was a kid. I always liked to go around them when I was a teenager because they had stories and told them endlessly--on coon hunts, in barber shops or just sitting around on the porch, in summer time.

It seemed when I was a boy that young people didn't have stories like the old men, who could relate things that had happened to them. Kids had no patience with a good story and hurried through one as if they were telling a joke.

Old men, however, had story telling down to an art. My uncle Frank, who worked at the post office in Monroe City, could stretch a story like a rubber band. He told, one time, about an old bachelor who was filing his first income tax return at a table in the post office, coming to Uncle Frank now and then for advice about the form.

"It took him next to forever," said Uncle Frank, "studying the ceiling and sucking his pencil, and making the words with his mouth and rubbing out mistakes, and I couldn't anymore help watching him than you could a bee that's got in the car with you.

"Finally he came over and asked me if he had done it right. I looked it over as careful a I could, till my eye got down to the bottom, and I like to busted out laughing. There was a blank down there that said 'Do Not Write In This Space' and that old fool had written, 'Don't tell me where to write. I'll write anywhere I damn please.'"

By the time he had told this, Uncle Frank's face was brick red with the full enjoyment of the punch line and his audience of old timers laughed 'til they choked.'

Now, it's been 60 years since I heard that story, and just yesterday, while going through some old newspaper files from the 1930s, I found it again, this time told about a resident of Shannon County 200 miles from where my uncle spent his life. It didn't bother me one bit to realize Uncle Frank was just passing on a tale all those years ago.

Trust an old man to tell a story better when he pretends it happened to him.