Older and Wiser

Older and Wiser
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 16, 2015

I spot a friend’s elderly father sitting outside the cafe with his coffee. A brisk north-easterly has turned Kirwin Street into a wind tunnel. A gust flaps his newspaper and whips a flurry of dry leaves under his table but he’s unperturbed.  

“Edward!” I say. “It’s freezing out here. Come inside and have your coffee with me.”

He hoists himself up to kiss my cheek. We move inside to a table by the wall. Edward, dapper in a navy sportscoat and crisp shirt, sweeps one hand across his glabrous head, flattening a few token wisps to his pate.

“How are you?” I say. It seems an obvious question to ask an 87-year-old.

“Can’t complain,” he replies. “I can still read the paper without glasses.”

I detect a note of pride.

“But my teeth are wearing out,” he adds. “I’m going to get new dentures and have the teeth of a 20-year-old. That’ll confuse the ladies!”

I ask about his left knee. (Long pestered by arthritis, it was reconstructed last year). He gives it a slap.

“It feels brand new!” he says, then cranes forward as if to tell me a secret.

“You know, I was dying at 71. My aorta was leaking.”

He unfastens the top button of his shirt and gives me a glimpse of the scar he says bisects him from throat to navel.

“They fixed me up with a pacemaker and a new aorta made of Kevlar. Kevlar! Now I’m bulletproof. I could live for a thousand years. The question is: would I want to?”

I wonder what’s coming next.

“At my age, people die. I’ve said goodbye to almost everybody.” He rattles off a catalogue of three dead brothers, long gone friends, neighbours, classmates, colleagues, the dentist.

“People my age are only alive because death’s forgotten to visit.”

“But are you lonely?”

“Of course! No-one wants to be alone. I miss the warmth of another body sleeping next to mine. But my life is never dull or empty. The good thing about getting old is there’s finally time for thinking. I like to speculate on the nature of human beings. In the mornings, I lie snug in my bed for a long time.” He chuckles. “Because I can!”

“Would you like to meet someone?”

“Where would I find another Barbara?” he ponders aloud. “I was so desperately in love with Barbara.”

His voice trails off and I study my coffee foam to give him a moment to collect himself.

“She was a helluva catch. I was eight years older. She died of lung cancer at 65. She was just a kid, for goodness sake!” I hear the bitterness in his voice, but then he softens.

“That’s the unfairness of life, isn’t it? I’ve never recovered from Barbara’s death. I’m not sure I want to.”

I stay silent.

“A man is only the reflection of the woman he lives with,” he says with a smile. “She completed me. We were married for 45 years. She’s been gone twelve years. It feels like an eternity.”

He brightens.

“But a large family is a good shock-absorber: five children, eight grand-children, four great-grand-children. When I’m with them, life’s fantastic.”

I tell him about my middle son’s upcoming birthday and ask: “How do you think of the future?”

“I make plans. I want to putter down the canals of France in a houseboat; go places I’ve never been. In January I cruised from Sydney to Fiji. There were 2000 passengers. I went to a singles night but only four people turned up. And two of them had partners.”

We snort in unison.

“You know, time goes faster as you get older. But it’s not time that’s going faster – it’s me going slower. Old age is what happens as you wear out. Like the soles of your shoes – week by week, slowly, imperceptibly, and then one day they’re just too worn out to put on. They’ve outlived their purpose.” He quotes a Jaques’ line from As You Like It:

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

He inspects the mottled skin on his still manly hands. “I’m doing okay, compared to some. I’m gobsmacked by my own good luck. How have I managed to get this far in such good nick? My memory’s the problem now. I can feel the fine details fading out. I see people I’ve known for 40 years and I can’t remember their names.”

It’s time to go. I feel buoyant after my half hour with this insightful, perpetually youthful old man. He stands up to say goodbye. “Luck is everything,” he reminds me.

I sit in the car and reflect, wondering if he’s right.

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

One for the Ages

One for the Ages
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 5, 2014

The gentleman up the road has been scolding me for referring to him in a previous column as ‘elderly.’ He’s 81.

This neighbour is a dapper fellow with a quick wit and rounded vowels. He walks slowly and deliberately. I know his measured steps are not from lack of spunk – he’s wary of the calamity that a fall would wreak on his bones.

I understand his caution. In the past few years I have stopped galloping down stairs three at a time. I no longer leap off the high walkway at the beach to shortcut my route to soft sand. I don’t need to test my physical prowess as I once did. I know I am not invincible.

But I feel guilty for saddling my neighbour with a lazy generalisation like ‘elderly,’ an adjective that does little but paint the lines on his face. Why do we have so few words to describe our later years? Just as we’re getting used to the idea of being middle-aged, we discover everyone younger than us thinks we’re old.

No-one can agree on when a person becomes elderly. Perhaps it’s when we talk too slowly, walk too slowly, drive too slowly. When we’ve given up on rushing, and time moves forward at a stately pace. Gerentologists now talk about the ‘young-old,’ those aged 65-74, the ‘middle-old’ (75-84) and the ‘oldest-old’ (85+).

Driving the kids home from a late swim at the beach, I threw a leading question to the back seat: “How old is elderly?”

Thirteeen-year-old son thought for a moment: “Sixty?”

“Sixty? Are you kidding me? How is that elderly?”

He shrugged. “Sixty’s pretty old you know Mum. People die at sixty.”

He had a point but not one I appreciated. “If someone dies at sixty” I explained, “we say they died too young. Not tragically young. But it was too short an innings. And hey, I’m going to be sixty in thirteen years so watch it buddy!” It was his turn to look horrified.

I decided ‘old’ is a moving target. I am one of the older mums at my daughter’s kindergarten, and one of the younger mums at my son’s high school.

And that made me wonder how my own Mum would describe ‘elderly’, now that she and all her friends are orbiting eighty. A decade ago, she would have defined elderly as anyone 15 years older than her. Now, she’s scrambling to recalibrate her terms. Elderly is anyone who can no longer ride a bike.

I wonder if my eldest son appreciates his grandmother’s ebullience. She doesn’t think of her age as something grim to be endured. She’s always first to suggest trooping off to the oval to kick the footy. She mows her own lawn. She can still outrun her 3-year-old grand-daughter at the park. My mother is one of the fortunate ones: luck and a robust constitution have so far kept serious illness at bay.

But she’s slowing down. I hear her cursing the arthritis that cramps her hands and feet. It pains her to open a door, unscrew a lid, lug groceries. She can no longer grip a tennis racquet. Her golf clubs idle in the boot of her car. I see the cuts and bruises on her arms after she’s pruned her roses. A rogue thorn tears through her papery skin.

To me, Mum has always been of permanently indeterminate age. Last year, stranded after an Eagles game with no trains running, she decided to walk the six kilometres home in the dark. Two police officers stopped to offer her a lift. “You shouldn’t be walking alone at night, Ma’am. Can we drop you home?”

“No thank you, I want to walk. And please don’t call me Ma’am.” (They took her address, drove ahead and sat waiting in her driveway until she arrived safely).

A former television colleague, now in his seventies, warns me: “You’ll feel invisible. At the shops, you’ll go unnoticed, ignored or served last because you’re not busy – you’re retired! I refuse to be treated that way. But if I complain, I’m just a grumpy old bugger!”

Few of us feel as old as we look. My neighbour pretends old age isn’t happening. And in his head, it isn’t. Body willing, I intend to choose when to act old. Then again, I might change my mind when I get there. If I still have it.