For Old Time’s Sake

For Old Time’s Sake
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday July 19, 2014

He’s wearing a pale grey tracksuit with darker cable-knit panels decorating his shoulders like epaulettes. An emergency buzzer is looped around his neck. Dangling off the silver chain is a plastic likeness of Walt Disney’s Goofy, painted orange. His name is Jim. He’s 85.

We’re settled into a small lounge curtained off from the dining hall of an aged care home. A bookshelf is lined with a well-thumbed collection of Robert Ludlums and Frederick Forsyths. Someone has lit the fire in the brick fireplace.

Jim’s wheelchair is one of several parked together to gather a small knot of elderly male residents. I’m the only visitor amongst this clique of men. “One of the ways to rejuvenate is to tell your stories,” the invitation said. “Women stay connected as they age, but men can forget how to talk.”

These old blokes, marshalled by a devoted handful of volunteers – all male – meet once a fortnight, encouraged to reminisce about the past and find comfort in the present.

Jim is keen to introduce himself. He fiddles with his hearing aid and grins at me: “Two years ago, I had a stroke on Monday, a stroke on Wednesday and lost the use of my legs on Friday. I’d never been in the sick-house all my life, and here I was being told I’d be living in one.”

I lean towards him to better decipher his Glaswegian accent. He adjusts his lower dentures, which have slipped from their mooring. He tells me his wife, Millie, of 65 years standing, lives in another apartment a few minutes walk down the winding driveway of this village.

“There are no shared rooms here,” he says. “My Millie has dinner with me every evening. Afterwards, I wave her good night through the window.” He raises his arm and mimics a cheeky wave for me. “When I’m separated from her I worry myself sick. Millie’s part of me and I’ve become part of her.”

He turns his head to survey the other gents, who are deep in conversation around us. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Now it’s loneliness who comes at night, instead of sleep, to sit beside my bed.” His eyes are growing watery. I look away so he can compose himself. I feel like an imposter, parading my sturdy health.

Bill is 89 and dressed in his tennis gear. He wears a white Nike cap pulled low over his forehead. He’s painfully thin, though I can still make out the ropey muscularity of his arms. He tells me he gave up the game at 87 after forty years of being a coach. “Arthritis,” he tells me. “Stole my grip. I’ve been on my own for fifteen years. My wife died from an aneurism. She was only 63.” He pauses, then brightens and begins regaling me with a colourful tale about how he lost his middle finger in 1937.

“I was 22. Strapping lad I was. My brother and I were cutting trees when a hollow log threw my hand against the saw. ’Look, Tommy!’ I said, and I showed him my finger swinging loose. Nothing to do but cut it free. One snip and it fell into the grass!”

He chuckles at the memory. I laugh too, trying not to sound too gleeful at this gruesome tale. Bill examines the lonely knuckle between his remaining fingers. I notice the road map of purple veins at his temple, his skin papery and translucent.  

I can’t help but admire these long lives. But fertile minds are now imprisoned in decrepit bodies. In their stories I hear old men nostalgic for their working years, a lament for what they can no longer be: farmer, plumber, soldier, truck driver.

“If only my mates in Glasgow could see me now, dressed in a pair of big knickers!” Jim says, and slaps his thigh. “I grew up in Kinning Park without a dunny, a fridge, or a bath. Lucky I forked out tuppence for a public bath the day I met my Millie! It was New Year’s Eve, 1950.” He grins. “We got married seven weeks later and I shipped us to Australia. We been living in Utopia ever since.”

At his right, 94-year-old George nods his agreement. “I made tyres on an assembly line. My boss says to me: ‘Had a barbecue yet mate?’ Course I hadn’t, so he sent out for some chops and snags. He cleared a bit of ground, collected some sticks and cooked my first barbecue on a shovel!”

I place my teacup back on the tray, quietly push back my chair and smile my goodbyes. The conversation turns towards musical theatre. As I slip behind the curtain, I hear the unmistakeable sound of yodelling. Quavery but with a tuneful falsetto, the yodel peters out to a faint chorus of applause. Another talent re-discovered!

Contact Peter Fry, Circle of Men – volunteer coordinator – pjfry@iinet.net.au

Leave Me Alone

Leave Me Alone
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday March 29, 2014

When was the last time you spent 24 hours alone? An entire day and night without human company? For me, it’s been decades. I now find it faintly ridiculous I spent so much of my early life trying to avoid being by myself.

The idea of a Saturday night at home was once unthinkable. I couldn’t imagine aloneness being enjoyable. Twenty years later, a Saturday night-in is a relief. I’ve lost my appetite for nightlife. Somewhere between giving birth to my third child and waking up on the wrong side of 45, wild partying and seedy Sundays no longer appeal.

Many of my friends remain the most social of butterflies. On weekends, they invariably ring to see what excitement the bloke and I have planned for tonight. I consider a giant fib: “Oh! We’re out to dinner! Yes! Yes! Some place new!”

Instead I feign nonchalance: “Actually, nothing! – we’re staying home.” There is an uncomfortable pause. “Nothing? Are you okay? What’s happened?” (Happy homebodies have no social status.)

A friend reels off her guest-list for tonight’s dinner party. I feel envious of her enthusiasm but not of the 2am finish, the stockpile of dirty dishes or the dawn summons of three children demanding their breakfast.

Perhaps we’ve confused ‘alone’ with ‘lonely.’ We sympathise with people whose aloneness has been forced upon them: the solitude created by grief, or illness or lack of independence. But self-inflicted seclusion is not yet an acceptable form of selfishness – that’s for those we label ‘eccentrics’ or worse, ‘misfits.’ I’d like to think there are loners who are perfectly content.

My husband has always delighted in being a lone wolf. He’s one of seven children (born in nine years, which only intensified the congestion). For him, there is no greater joy than time spent alone. His idea of utopia is an entire weekend free to dig up the garden, absorb the newspapers and catch back-to-back footy games. Preferably all three undertaken in silence. I fear I’m disappointing company!

My first taste of solitude came, aged 27, after moving to Sydney for a new job. I landed in the middle of summer, but mistook it for winter: the oppressive battle-ship grey skies and constant drizzle, the air clammy with humidity. Home was a dank two-bedroom flat shared with a work colleague I barely knew. Homesickness came in waves on weekends. I found being alone disconcerting, even intimidating.

One Saturday morning, with my flat-mate away, I ate round after round of jam toast and allowed my mind to speculate on catastrophes. What if I choke on this crust? How long before someone finds me – my body propped against the kitchen cupboards, contorted with rigor mortis, surrounded by crumbs and sticky drips of apricot jam. Even my fantasies were pathetic.

I decided if I must endure a weekend alone, I’d leave my death to fate and mingle with strangers instead. I walked from Neutral Bay, across the Harbour Bridge, marvelling at the giant scale of my new city.

I sat idling in cafes, the outsider, studying the myriad faces of the city’s inhabitants, inventing histories to go with the snippets of conversations that drifted past me on the footpath. My solitude began to feel good.

That night, I took myself to a movie. I chose Apollo 13, hoping for a happy ending. I stood self-consciously in the line, hemmed in by hand-holding couples and old friends swapping new gossip. “How many?” said the usher, as I shuffled towards the stalls. “Just the one” I said. He shone his torch down the aisle. “There’s a single seat on the end of Row G,” he said, spotlighting the one solo seat amid a dim sea of heads. Two matrons on a big night out swivelled in tandem to check out the singleton about to flop down beside them. “We’ll keep you company!” one said, and offered me a Fantail. I was touched.

Today, I reign ineffectively over three exuberant, exhausting children. On those afternoons when their pre-dinner tantrums threaten a brain snap (mine, not theirs) I fantasise about running away from home. Yesterday, mustering my herd for school, my teenage son lit my fuse by refusing to take a shower: “Geez Mum” he shouted. “I smell fine! Calm your farm!” I would have, but I was already tussling with his little sister, who was shrieking her objections to hair brushing.

I’ve made my goal this year to seek more solitude. On kindy mornings, I will despatch all three children to school, ignore the dishes and lie deep-breathing in the sanctuary of our unmade bed. I will revel in the brief stillness of my empty house and feel liberated.

That’s the kind of loner I want to be.

Only the Lonely

Only the Lonely
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday September 21, 2013

“So, how many brothers and sisters do you have?” asks the school mum I’m standing with.

We’d been chatting, this new friend and I, waiting for our six-year-olds to come barrelling out of class. I feel a thud of embarrassment at her question, but I force a smile and reply: “I’m an only child.”  

I say those four words with a shrug so they’ll appear weightless, but they drop between us like stones. I see on her face that peculiar mix of curiosity and suspicion. She can’t hide the look I know so well.

“Wow!” she says, “I wouldn’t have picked you for one of those,” and our conversation skids in a direction that makes me feel exposed.

“What was it like growing up?” she asks.

“Oh fine!” I reply, “You don’t know what you’re missing if you never had it.”

She looks at me expectantly, waiting for more, but I’m saved by the bell as kids come swarming through doorways.

On the walk home through the park with my son, I feel a familiar pang of alienation, an uneasiness at having been outed. Even as an adult, a single childhood still feels like something to hide.

My mum wanted lots of babies, but she and my dad divorced when I was three. No matter – I had a long-suffering Siamese kitten who filled the role of baby sister. I’d squeeze her into dolls’ dresses and wheel her up the street imprisoned in my toy pram.

As a kid, I’m not sure I even knew what ‘lonely’ felt like. I was just alone, and I was very good at it. Inventing ways to compete against myself turned into elaborate tests of endurance. (I was a fierce opponent). My nanna gave me a plastic kitchen timer which I put to work, furiously pedalling my blue bike around the block, trying to beat yesterday’s record.  

Obstacle courses were my specialty. I mapped them out with an eight-year-old’s precision:  start at the thunderbox, swing once around the Hills Hoist, sprint to the back fence, twice down the slide and leap onto the veranda to finish. 53 seconds – not quick enough. (Losers got eaten by the crocodiles who lived in the cracks in the pavement.)

 We had little spare money for toys, so I grew expert at collecting odd things. I sorted buttons by colour into glass jars and curated coin exhibitions on bedspreads. I invited beetles into plastic containers fitted with five-star cotton-wool day beds and leafy gazebos .

Sleeping over at my cousins’ house, the noise of their big family was overwhelming.  Tormented by her big brother, my girl cousin would unleash her ear-piercing shriek:

“Mum! Christopher yanked my hair!”  

“I did not, you dobber!” he’d bellow in protest.

I’d be scared witless but secretly thrilled as he chased us down the hallway. My role was reluctant witness for when brother whacked sister, or sister pinched brother. My Aunty would storm out of the kitchen with flour on her hands and shout at us over the ruckus: “ENOUGH! All of you – outside and sort it out!

I was worn out from the rioting but even so, I hated being detached from the herd. In the quiet at home, I’d head for my room and dive back into The Famous Five. Books transported me into other teeming families where I could observe the action without feeling compelled to join it.

But my favourite story was about an only child who lived in a third storey apartment in New York, just as Mum and I had lived in a third-floor flat in South Perth. The girl in the book had strung a makeshift sign out of the window, hoping the people walking below would look up. “Hello!” the sign said. “Wave to me if you see this.” When we moved into a duplex, I scolded myself for not playing that game when I’d had the chance. In my teens, it dawned on me the story’s theme was isolation.

In high school, I worried that a kid with no siblings would be branded a misfit. But I wasn’t. Friendships came easily and I cherished girlfriends like sisters. (I still do). But I envied their take-for-granted solidarity with siblings. They always had someone to watch their back or take their side.

I carried into adulthood those traits often ascribed to only children:  over-achieving, over-sensitive, over-indulged, self-centred. I’ve tried to rub out those tics, tried not to conform to stereotype, lest someone point a finger and say: “See!”

Now, when I meet another only child, we make an instant connection. Feeling safe, I’ll plough straight in and ask: Did you feel lonely growing up?” Almost always the answer is “No,” followed by a pause: “But now that I think about it, maybe I was.”

And then I go home to my own brood of three, cavorting and messing up the loungeroom and yelling: “Mum! Come into our cubby!”

I put my childhood aside and concentrate on theirs.