I celebrated my birthday this month; on Jan 16th I was 66. That sounds like a terrible age to me but I don’t really feel so old. When one of my clients heard that I had had a wonderful barbeque with all my family over the weekend she asked me how old I was. The lady concerned is 88 so maybe 66 does not look so decrepit from where she is standing. She commented that I was “good for my age” but I just laughed and asked her what she was doing when she was 66. After a bit of simple mathematics she worked out that her husband had still been alive, she was doing part time work at the grammar school, playing bowls and on the committee of the bowling club so she could see that although her life as a 66 year old was different to mine it was certainly just as energetic. Her poor health in recent years had just made her forget that she had been active and busy at that stage of her life.
It reminded me of my mother. When she came to visit us in South Africa when she would have been in her mid sixties she told us about her life in Cheddar and that one of the things she did was to go up to the old age home and “help with the old dears”. How my sons laughed at that, to them she was very much an old dear herself. Although they were impressed with her fitness and health to them she was very, very old. I remember being very proud of her, that at her advanced age she should still be willing to help those who were not as fit as she was. I was in my early thirties then and the boys in their very early teens. Mom died last June a few months short of her 99th birthday and had remained fit and active until the last couple of years of her life, although she did end up in a nursing home as one of the “old dears” she had helped in her sixties.
Now my sons are in their early forties, older than I was went they laughed at their grandmother going to help “the old dears” I wonder if they remember that. I am sixty-six about the same age as my Mom was at that time and here I am with a group of “old dears” of my own. Working with people who are mostly twenty or thirty years older than me does stop me from feeling old I suppose and people keep telling me that ‘Today’s 60 is yesterday’s 40’ One of my old dears called me ‘middle aged’ a while ago and I had to point out that if I was now middle aged it implied that I could live until 130. I might have inherited good genes from my mother but I really don’t think 130 is likely.
Yes old age is relative. I remember once when I was working with my mother in our shop back in Swansea many many years ago we were looking out of the window and my Mom said “See those two girls over there”. I could not see any girls and she said, “Across the other side of the road, just walking passed the pub”. I still could not see the girls so she said “One wearing a brown coat and the other with a head scarf on”. I said, “those aren’t girls, they are old women”. She said “Oh well I won’t tell you what I was going to say about them, I was going to tell you that they were at school with me but I don’t think I will now”
Once when I was a teenager I heard my parents talk about the death of an acquaintance who had just died suddenly. They were both shocked at the death and one of them said “He was only a young man; he could not have been more than 42”. I remember thinking that 42 was old. I thought that at 42 one could surely expect you were coming to the end of ones days. Years later when we heard on the radio that Elvis Presley had died I did a bit of mental arithmetic and said “But he was only 42” Same age, just looked at from a different angle.
So to all of you who read this with bifocal glasses remember that the alternative to old age is not very pleasant. I’m glad I’m still around to enjoy my children and my grandchildren even if they do think of me as an “old dear”
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