Tony Deyal
"I GUESS I am having a senior moment," my colleague said, trying to explain his inability to temporarily remember a name. He repeated it like a mantra everytime he could not recall something. Frankly, he scared me since I have always believed that "age does not matter unless you're a cheese". This quote from Billie Burke is also the name of a book of collected sayings from "senior" citizens who continue to have their moments regardless. As the great singer Lena Horne said modestly, "It's ill-becoming for an old broad to sing about how bad she wants it. But occasionally we do". In that sense, age is a question of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
REAL TRAGEDY
The real tragedy of getting older is that you stay young on the inside, but it is impossible for other people to know. I have always believed that when you're over the hill, it is then that you begin to pick up speed, but this thing about "senior" moments dented and shook my self-confidence. I suppose that I could do a Robert Frost. The famous poet said, "I cut my own hair. I got sick of barbers because they talk too much. And too much of their talk was about my hair falling out". On that basis, I should stop going to meetings except that I continue to remain aggressively ageing. When anyone comments on my increasing hair-loss, I don't exclaim waspishly, "Balderdash!" but instead, draw their attention to a truism, "Just because there is a hole in the roof it does not mean that the fire inside has gone out, in fact it, burns even brighter". That stuns them for a while, but does not stop them. Like my son George who told me that I should only pay the barbers half price. This was greeted with a frosty silence.
Senior moment episodes are scary. For instance, I know there are three signs of old age. The first is your loss of memory. The other two I forgot. What I remember is a cute saying probably by an old farmer the young sow wild oats, the old grow sage. Me, as I grow older, I realise that there is money to be made in tomatoes because it contains lycopene, which helps to lower the risk of prostate cancer, sawpalmetto (ditto) and prunes (rhymes with ditto). However, what I grow is impatient. Some might say, wiser, but another old-timer, Will Durant the historian, admitted, "Sixty years ago, I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."
OUTRAGE
There are some things that you can get away with most of the time. Feminist and activist (I suppose they both mean the same thing) Maggie Kuhn believes, "Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week." True to her philosophy, she remarked, "I''m having a glorious old age. One of my greatest delights is that I have outlived most of the opposition". And conductor Pierre Monteux adds some spice, "I still have two abiding passions. One is my model railway, the other women. But at the age of 89, I find I am getting just a little too old for model railways.
GENUINE FEELING
Clint Eastwood, who in 1996, aged 66, had a daughter with a woman 35 years his junior, likened ageing to golf, "To me, life is like the back nine in golf. Sometimes you play better on the back nine. You may not be stronger, but hopefully you're wiser. And if you keep most of your marbles intact, you can add a note of wisdom to the coming generation." Maybe you can also tell them, "Go ahead, make my day".
But to get serious for a moment, perhaps to redefine this senior moment business, I like what Albert Schweitzer said and leave it as the penultimate word on the subject of ageing, "The tragedy of life is not in the fact of death. The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response; the death of awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in oneself. No man need fear death: He need fear only that he may die without having known his greatest power the power of his free will to give his life for others. That is why I have now come to the inescapable conclusion that old age is always at least fifteen years older than I am."
Tony Deyal was last seen saying that he has finally worked it out. Old age begins when you start looking backward rather than forward. The whole idea of ageing is to grow up without growing old.