“An old man loved is winter with flowers”

I feel something of an irrational fondness for old men. Not  “seniors”, not “old folks,” but genuine geezers. And not, I don’t think, just because I’m well on the way to becoming one. So I have begun to ruminate, through poetry and portraiture, on their inner lives, especially those of the rich, ribald characters who inhabit my village. I want to get from them a map of the territory that I will be entering, soon enough.  

Does aging for men promise only, in the poet T.S. Eliot’s words, “the cold friction of expiring sense/without enchantment”? Or was Robert Service, a famous forebear from my own family, closer to the mark when he said, “I’ve only one foot in the grave/the other’s in the gravy”?