The trip to OLD AGE
Steve Braunias contemplates his unfussy life as he turns 60 today
He could be seen the other day shopping for spring bulbs at the Mitre 10 gardening centre in New Lynn. This is already bad enough. It fairly and squarely places him as a domestic drudge, a creature of the suburbs, performing that rite which never features in stories about truly exciting people — shopping. But it gets worse. He has a problem. The bulbs are in a huge bin, beside a row of small brown paper bags; a sign advises that “30-40” bulbs can fit in a bag, for the low, low price of $10. But he fills the bag — and it only fits 20. This is misleading, he thinks. This is false advertising. He takes the bag to checkout. He wonders: Should I say something? And then: I should say something. But he reconsiders: If I say something, does that make me a fussbucket?
Let us leave him delicately hanging on to the horns of a tremendously boring dilemma and consider what this story illustrates. The facts establish that he shops in West Auckland, has an interest in gardening, and talks to himself. But there is something else going on. Every story has an ending, and the end is always death; the older you are, the closer you approach it; and our man in New Lynn is captured here on one of the last days before a significant birthday, which confirms him, officially, statistically, inarguably, as old. That birthday falls today. Happy birthday, old person dithering over the spring bulbs!
What a drab way to approach old age. There are so many other vivid options and right now there are New Zealanders of silver years out and about enjoying every drop of their diminishing lives. He could be doing something exciting, like surfing; there are plenty of ancient surfers, their grey bodies wrapped in sleek black plastics, their gnarled toes hanging 10 for dear life. But he can’t swim.
Very well, he could be doing something free and easy, like a road trip; New Zealand is full of pensioners in campervans, their feet up with an ocean view one day, a lakeside vista the next, with string bags of onions and garlic hanging from the ceiling, rows of terrible paperbacks in little shelves, living a no-fixed-abode dream — his father wanted to do this in his last years, talked about it with real excitement. But he can’t drive. And so there he is, waterless and roadless, a stationary biped squeezing 20 daffodil bulbs into a paper bag.
HE DOESN’T think too much about the future. The past is more of a consuming interest. There comes a time when we all stop to review it, like a show that’s finished. A thought crosses his mind like a dark shadow: what has he done with his life? Dreadful question, quite terrifying. It trembles like an anxiety throughout most of our days. We have to get on with things, we have to achieve something, we have to work towards a goal or a dream or some promise of happiness. And then we have to take stock. “So this is Christmas,” John Lennon sang, “and what have you done?”
It’s not going to get a lot of likes or retweets if the answer is Oh not all that much. He attempts a brief survey of his professional career. He works as a journalist. He began in 1980. He was thinking of writing and publishing a memoir of his career this year and calling it 40 Years A Hack.
The time he went to Amsterdam, and met Michael Jackson! The time he messed with a cop, and got fired! So many war stories, but his own response to every journalist’s war stories is to think: So what. He hates anecdotage. Journalism is a frozen pond. You skate over it, fast.
He thinks of the great ambition of Franz Kafka: “A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” He has it written down in one of several journals, or versions of commonplace books, where he has scattered this and that epigram, quote, passage. W. Somerset Maugham, from Of Human Bondage: “I must tell you. There is no talent here. Merely industry and intelligence. You will never be anything but mediocre.” A letter from John Keats to Fanny Brawne (no relation): “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death.” Tolstoy, in War and Peace: “Sleep in the evening is silver; sleep in the afternoon is golden.”
THEY SELL straw matting at Mitre 10. He could lay down right there, and enjoy a golden afternoon nap . . .
Do we have to account for our lives when the past is longer than the future? The need to come to some sort of reckoning is pressing as we age, and we look back on the usual chaos of all lives.
The done thing is to blandly conclude “I’ve had a happy life”. He doesn’t know if he’d go that far. Certainly, he had his moments. A forthcoming memoir by a film-maker he knew when she was a beautiful girl mentions him in sensual passing. “He kisses like a girl, long and swoony. I kiss him back in kind . . . Kissing is one of life’s sweet things; I’m only just discovering that.” Fabulous review! Cheers! But she always was very clever and poised — he supposes her reputable publisher will give her memoir a rather finer title than 40 Years A Hack — and it didn’t last. He was crazy about her but it was an illicit liaison, she had someone else and come to think of it so did he.
Freud has something to say about that. To the commonplace book! He has recorded something from Janet Malcolm’s book Psychoanalysis: The impossible profession: “The analytic literature is full of cases of men (or women) who cannot establish relationships with women (or men) that are in any way satisfying and act it out by getting involved with people who are already married, whom they can see only rarely, and whose lives consequently are chronically unsatisfying.”
Well, no, he thinks, that’s not him. Not really. There have been long and loving relationships. He got especially lucky in 2005: he met someone: a family was made, a home was bought, there were two cats in the yard. When he turned 50, he developed a theory that was the age when you either got your life sorted out or you hadn’t. If you had, it was all plain sailing after that. If you hadn’t, it was your own fault and you were probably doomed to loneliness. The theory didn’t make a lick of sense. Life can collapse or mend itself at any point. And it’s just a coincidence that his new girlfriend lives in Wellington, and he sees only rarely . . .
He broods on the Freudian analysis. With shame, he thinks of the hurt he’s caused others; it’s always the worst thing you can do with your life, and there’s no excuse for it. People who fail their families are failures. What a coincidence that his own father failed his family! But then he pictures the golden shining face of his daughter, who he loves with every breath, and her 13 years of loveliness — the beach holidays, the first day at school, her delicate face in profile — fills him with joy. Our children save us. They’re our most precious commodity, our only hope. He sighs in Mitre 10 and blandly supposes: I’ve by and large had a happy life.
HE MAKES his way to checkout. Twenty bulbs, $10 — such tidy sums, and it’s easy to keep track of your age when you’re born in a year ending in zero. A literary friend emails, “Fancy turning 60 on 20.06.20. Almost a palindrome.”
1960! Okay, boomer. Generation of swine, the cause of everything wrong with the world today, the landed gentry fiddling while Gen X and those reportedly awful, awful millennials of Gen Y burn with resentment. Well, you never know how history is going to turn out. He had no idea he was going to belong to a generation that would be as scorned as much as the generation that came before him.
But it’s just the way things go. He met poet Denis Glover towards the end of the poet’s life. Glover was drunk, and he filled his great red nose with pinches of snuff. The poet was a wreck, but gave a reading — they appeared onstage in Palmerston North when the hack was a poet manque — with such music and wit, and there were lines that he has always remembered. “When these old bastards die,” Glover wrote, of men in power, “there’ll be another lot.” No generation is better or worse.
Such thoughts, if this is what we can describe these bits and pieces of vague memories, faint notions and white noise, are interrupted when he feels a tap on his shoulder. He turns, and a man says, “Are you Steve Braunias?” “Yes.”
The man is approximately 35. “Love that f***en Secret Diary!” he says, gives a thumbs-up, and walks away. Well, that was nice. A woman, aged approximately 65, stopped him at the Commercial Bay mall in downtown Auckland the other day when he was shopping with his daughter, and gave a rather more elegant but no less sincere compliment about his work. And a woman who was sweeping the pavement in front of her house in Te Atatu stopped him last week when he was walking to the shop, and said, “Are you . . . ” He stood, and waited. She held the handle of her broom and stared at him. “Are you,” she began again, “a teacher at Rutherford College?” “No.”
“What do you do?”
“I write for the Herald.”
“Oh,” she said, and looked disappointed. The woman, aged approximately 125, went back to sweeping late autumn leaves into the gutter. They had passed each other like ghosts and their brief encounter was a reminder of his status in life. “I’m an average nobody,” Henry Hill says at the end of Goodfellas. “Get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”
But that’s fine. In fact, to be just another schnook has been one of his ambitions. Life is something to be measured in small acts, sometimes of kindness. You search for beauty. You look for it at the ends of the earth or in your garden. The lady with the broom was bringing order to nature; and that’s what he was doing, too, with his bag of bulbs, which he intended to plant in neat rows.
HE IS now second in line in the queue. Everyone who has ever turned officially old, or even older, and hasn’t died yet, thinks: How did I get here? How did this happen? How is it that I’ve become an antique? It feels like an accounting error. But it all adds up, it’s an accurate sum. You put one foot in front of another long enough then it’s just what happens, and you’ve only got yourself to blame. It’s your own fault. All the old people you’ve ever known, with their entrenched opinions, their way of doing things, their nuisance value, their deep and enduring irrelevance — that’s you now, that’s your lot.
What to do about it, how to behave? If only old age came with an instruction manual. The closest he’s ever seen to something like that was quite recently, when he asked Auckland poet Kevin Ireland, 87 next month, to write about the subject of age.
“We’ve become elderly without quite knowing how to explain it.” Ireland wrote. Yes. It does seem mysterious and puzzling. But then the essay took a more serious turn. “A lot of old friends and acquaintances didn’t make it and in many cases, it now seems quite apparent that they didn’t intend to. I look back on some friends’ ends and it seems now as though they actually embraced death.”
It has the ring of truth, doesn’t it? Ireland isn’t talking about suicide or anything active. We all know people who burned bright because they had got very, very close to the sun; spectacular and manic, their only option was to burn out. Usually, they just drank too much. There’s another kind of willed death — the people who simply give up, or give in. Maybe the pressure got too much. Maybe the pain got too much. Maybe they were afflicted by the deadliest enemy of old age: bitterness, and disappointment. They oughtn’t to be judged; they just “didn’t make it”. But you never know what you’re going to miss out on. “You’ve got to hope for the best, and that’s the best you can hope for,” sang Pete Burns from Wah! Heat, in the great 1983 anthem, Story of the Blues (Parts 1 & 2). You’ve got to try and make it.
HE’S NOW at the head of the queue. Very well; so you make it; bravo; and then what? Ireland rejected the idea that antiquity was anything to crow about. “I don’t believe people who boast they never moan about advanced age, and they’re always happy. There’s nothing cheerful to realise that your body is turning against you like a traitor.” There was only one sensible conclusion: “Old age has nothing to recommend it.” As to what to do about it, and how to behave, Ireland’s essay recommended one particular quality: “Fortitude. Grinning fortitude.”
Grin and bear it. With good cheer and good friends. He’ll be doing exactly that this evening at his birthday soiree. But doubt creeps in. Will his sexy girlfriend look at him differently? Will the other guests regard him with the pity we set aside for those of fragile disposition? After he conducted his business at Mitre 10, he went to Reading Cinema in Lynnmall and watched The Trip To Greece .He was the only person in the theatre. He was the only person in the theatre and there he was, weeping, moved by the film’s intimate portrait of ageing and death. It should be rated R60: no one over 60 allowed in.
But life’s consistently awesome. It’s got so many good things in it no matter how old or infirm or ga-ga or weepy you get. Cheers to the elderly. Lena Walker turned 108 last week. New Zealand’s oldest woman was given a party at her home at Radius Baycare in Haruru Falls in the Bay of Islands. Peter de Graaf reported the occasion in the Northern Advocate . He wrote, “Paul Eley, of Whangārei, put his grandmother’s long life down to simple living. She had always grown her own vegetables, made her own clothes, and never wanted a fuss.”
Never wanted a fuss! Words to live by. He pays for his $10 bag of 20 daffodil bulbs at the Mitre 10 checkout without a word of complaint. No fussbucket, he. Because, really, what’s he got to moan about? He’s in tip-top shape. He’s got all his hair. He marches out of the store into light rain. The winter sky is black and white. The branches of trees are as bare as bone. He loves West Auckland. He thinks of his adorable daughter. He wonders what he’ll eat for dinner. What can you do about life except live it? It’s going too far to say he has a spring in his step but he makes his way along the wet pavement with a smile on his face. He’s only 60.
Life is something to be measured in small acts, sometimes of kindness. You search for beauty. You look for it at the ends of the earth or in your garden.
All the old people you’ve ever known, with their entrenched opinions, their way of doing things, their nuisance value, their deep and enduring irrelevance — that’s you now, that’s your lot.