Are you an "old timer"?

When I was a kid, I used to hear my folks talk about "old timers."  I thought of them as my grandpa and his circle of friends, a bunch of old guys who enjoyed talking to each other.  Well, the other day, I met an "old timer" and I venture to say, he was not much older than I.

I had lost the keys to my car at one of Tucson's "gem show" sites-big tents where vendors of all types of jewelry, gemstones and other artifacts, hawk their wares.  It was getting cold and dark, so I took refuge in a temporary office that read "Gem Show Sales."   I found a husky, friendly, plain-spoken guy in a plaid shirt,  suspenders and jeans, who was taking reservations from vendors for the 2009 show.  (He had run gem shows since the idea first arrived in Tucson.)

 I asked him if I could wait inside till AAA arrived and we began an interesting conversation.  Turns out he lived in the community of "Catalina", a scattered rural town that surrounds the "active adult retirement community' where we live in Tucson.  This "old timer" told me he settled in Catalina in 1975 when there were a few mobile homes, three huge cattle ranches, little shacks with horses and other livestock, and plenty of wildlife-coyotes howling at night, deer running from them.  He told me about the great "flood" of 1983 that swept through the community from a summer afternoon "monsoon" and how it took out the ranches and the livestock of Catalina.  That day the water swirled 60 feet up a hilly road known as "Wilds Road" that we still use.  

I had often wondered why the county has condemned huge swaths of land along a road I travel daily and why there are the remains of barns, corrals and a few pecan groves.  This "old timer" filled in my puzzle.  

The dictionary defines an "old timer" as "a) an elderly person and b) a person  with considerable tenure or experience in a given place or activity."  I hope someday to be considered an "old timer" with some stories others relish.  Are you storing up some good anecdotes, recipes, pictures or stories so that you can be an old timer too?  I hope so.