Gentle, into that good night

I THINK it is the physical manifestations of growing old that first set the bells ringing.

For example, there is the nose that is so hard to unblock because “Curley” Denholm donged me on it one wet and windy Saturday in the fifties, up on the TCA ground; then I went to the pub after the match, instead of the hospital, and got home very late and somewhat the worse for wear; then Mum saw my face in the morning and went thoroughly bonkers about it, so she and Step rushed me to the Royal where I was told to come back and be admitted the following Sunday; so I wandered around for a week feeling thoroughly miserable and the butt of tasteless jokes about where my face may have been; so back I went the following Sunday to be put in bed and told I would be operated on the next morning; then a couple of interns arrived at my bed of pain on their evening rounds and reminded me that I had played intervarsity football against them in previous years; then, after discussing how much we drank at which pubs in Melbourne the previous year they said they would “do” me that night, having declared it would be good training for them; so in I went to surgery that night, chatting to the nurses and looking forward to a straight nose; then I awoke in the morning feeling horrible with my nose all over my face and no sign of the hard-drinking, big-talking apprentice nose straighteners; then the specialist Dr Hiller turned up, had one gander at me and threw a massive tantrum that had the entire staff hiding under the bed-pans — all of this because, during the interregnum between Curley Denholm and Dr Hiller my nose had set in the broken position but the apprentices had re-broken it in the wrong place and were very nearly sacked and defrocked in the ensuing drama; then Dr Hiller had to do the job himself which meant another visit to the surgery; and finally I came out, breathing through my nose — just — but with a bump on one side and a hunk of bone half way up the right passage that juts out in such a way as to make it very difficult for me to blow my nose hard enough to get the tough bits out without my ears falling off; and they reckon the Royal Hobart Hospital has problems in 2005 — “they” should have tried it nearly five decades ago!

Aside from the nose there are other organs, limbs and sundry bits and pieces that have not stood the test of time without blemish or defect of some kind. Football — along with squash, tennis, running, walking and whatever other exertions I once undertook — also accounts for a couple of wonky knees that irritate me more as each year passes. Then we have the rusty right wrist and the limp left forearm, the ankles that creak in bed, the scars of knee and lip and arm and the hair that is nearly no more. However, I doubt that sport was responsible for a modest decline in hearing capacity, an errant memory of both the physical and convenient varieties, constipation, medicated depression and various other things that have seized up, dropped off, wrinkled over, been ripped out by the medical and dental professions, ceased to function or are otherwise sending signals of more, much more than this to come.

I must come clean

Now, having vented all that spleen, I must come clean — I like growing old. There is a great deal to be said for growing old, especially growing old where I live and doing what I now do. I live in a very sparsely populated corner of Tasmania where I walk and cut wood and fish and grow vegetables and help my wife of some four and half decades in the shrub and flower gardens. It is quiet gentle place within a only a modest fifteen minutes of Swansea and about 75 minutes of Hobart. In short, I can roll along in the ute to Hobart and reach the city in a shorter time than it takes most of the residents of Sydney and Melbourne to get to work.

That is the setting and the outside of living where I live. And nor does the inside grate on the finer senses. One and a half centuries of old stone keeps the cold of winter out as it does with the heat of peak summer. Inside is eating good food and reading good books and writing and enjoying each other and the friends who drop in or stay for a day or so and the daughters and their partners and our grand daughter who join us in summer and at other times.

So growing old where I live is a soft and gentle business. It is also a time — a time after the flurried decades of running fast and feasting on self-importance — to really enjoy and better understand those closest to me. My wife and daughters have had much to endure over my working years and their tolerance and love deserves respect and repayment. The horrible blight of depression very occasionally elbows the medication aside and results in a flare up but it is reasonably under control. Besides, the doctor said it should only last a year or so. It is part of the ageing process, he said. My doctor is a lovely fellow but I thought that was a cruel thing to say to a bloke who thought he was Peter Pan. Or perhaps that was why he said it.

So yes, old age is not so much a time for false teeth in glasses of water or inadvertent farts in department stores. For me it is a time of softer light, a gentle pragmatism and a couple of reds at dinner. A time when love is more measured, more profound and all the more important for being so.

I enjoy some of Dylan Thomas’s poetry but I don’t aspire to

“……….. burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Nor shall I necessarily go gentle into that good night. Rather, I shall see what comes and when and seek, then, to accommodate it as best I can.

Above all, I am in no hurry. No hurry at all.