"Come een, come een," nodded William, an elderly man at an old age home we visited today. Rachel and I followed him from the hall at the edge of the courtyard into a bedroom, larger than most. There were three beds, each with raggy patterned sheets carefully tucked on foam mattresses. A high tin ceiling made raindrops echo throughout the bare room, the only furniture was a large wooden dresser and a few plastic lawn chairs. He pulled two of the chairs out from the wall and positioned them carefully beside his bed. I sat down. 

     "No, no, no," muttered the wrinkled, toothless man, shaking his head. "You need soft... peellow." He motioned for me to stand up and when I did he pushed a pillow onto the chair and smiled, "mhhmmph." He sat down on his bed and started to tell us about his life. He told us about his nineteen surguries and his travels as a young man. While he talked his face would crinkle up, his eyes closing and then opening in deep thought. Then he would spread out his hands, gesturing here and there, and his face would light up with excitement. He paced back and forth as he told us about how his days as a young man working in the markets in Austria and how he would carry food to the market each morning in the dark before it opened. He told us about his adventures in Mali, Africa, and France and South America. He testified about how his bones had been cured of disease miraculously, which is why he could walk. He would say, in a messy toothless slur, " ahhh, I will tell you story of my life, si, another thing," and then continue on.

     Soon he meandered over to the dresser and took a box out of a drawer. He messily spread it's contents; dozens of notes, envelopes, photographs and folders, onto the bed next to him. One at a time he took a piece of paper and passed it to us for inspection. He took out a picture of his parents and recalled a time when his mother and him were taken to jail during the second world war in California because the police thought they were Russian spies. I saw a picture of his brother who was apparently a hippie and of him in one of his eight years at college. William put a date to everything that he told us, "That waz een, 1971, no, it was 1519, I mean 1951, yes 1951 on a Weensday at tres hour, no at four on September 17th or 7th, si, September 7th." William once saw Fidel Castro during the Cuban revolution and nobody else recognized him, but William introduced himself. Before we left, the old man had read us poetry from one of his published poetry books and sampled a song from the days of his musical career. Finally, after making the sign of the cross and sniffling his already wrinkled nose, he admitted to having been good friends with Osama Bin Laden. 

     I'm fully aware that the events he retold are fantastically unlikely, but somehow it is wonderful to believe with him that he lived through some of the most turbulent and incredible events in the last century. The way that his eyes lit up when he remembered something, the way that he talked with a heavily accented studder and the possibility that the man who now lives only in this plain room, once explored the world, is what makes his version of history perfect.