“Is that all there is?
…then let’s have a ball if that’s
all there is.”
Peggy Lee
Popular Singer 1964
Chapter One
Gateways to Ageing
There is slight holding back of tides, rock glaciers or old age. They all move on, inexorably, no matter what attempts are made to either halt or decelerate them. Tides and rock glaciers can perhaps be slowed for geological moments but definitely the only thing in the universe that cannot be permanently altered by any human intervention is the relentless encroachment of age. Robert Browning wrote in his poem, “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (1864) “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life for which the first was made…” In 1864 the average age at death in the USA was forty-five years and a bit more in Australia. Browning had already lived an expected lifetime. He was fifty-two when he penned, “Grow old…” and he had twenty-five more years to live. The latter part of his life took place when America and western democracies like Australia KNEW that life was only going to get better and better…and better. Optimism prevailed. Humanity was on a steep climb to near perfection, or so it was thought and was expressed in the myth of inevitable progress by the French psychologist Emile Coue’ in the early Twentieth Century when he wrote, “Day by day, in every way, things are getting better and better”.
Browning and Coue’ may have given us a few good poems and a new idea or so about progress but when they locked us into “…the best is yet to be…” and “…things are getting better and better…”, the psyche of the Western mind was given a great disservice. As one ages it is obvious that the best is not necessarily the best…nor yet to be the best. And all things do not get better and better automatically. It appears that virtually no one foresaw a plague that was coming. It was not to be a plague of biblical proportions but a plague nonetheless. I refer to the coming plague of us…the people…not just the people…but us oldies, us senior citizens sometimes referred to as the aged, the elderly, the mature, decrepit or the useless, or used-by-date citizens as we are sometimes referred. To read science magazines and books today is to discover about the “Problem of Ageing and the Aged” ad naseum. I will let you in on a secret: This legislation push for assisted suicide, mercy killing and euthanasia is sponsored by a secret group of young people in their forties who are in high positions of authority! They are fearful that the coming revolution which will be run by US, the oldies! However, have you ever tried to organize a flock of ducks?
The gateways to old age began quite early for me. My first realization of a personal ageing process was at my fifth birthday. I was a particularly aggressive and acerbic child who grew up on a tough street in a tough railroad village. I guess I was also pretty competitive. I seldom lost a foot race or ice skate competition and perhaps I was big for my age. Mother started it. “No, Buck, you cannot get any prizes for the games. It is your birthday. Yes, I know you were first in all the races and games. You are five years old now…old enough to know you have to share with your friends…never mind you beat them all. You are older!” Thus I came to my first gateway of ageing. The lesson was that as you age something is lost. Naively, I thought life got better as you got older. One day I would be stronger than my brothers. Not so, I was to learn.
My next lesson in ageing happened in a hay barn at Uncle Emil’s farm. I was perhaps eight or nine. Dozens of us cousins, boys and girls, were playing chasings in the hay as the harvest was proceeding. It was a huge Dutch-type barn so high it was difficult to play Ennie Eye Over. This was a game where one side threw a tennis ball over the roof to the other side and someone caught the ball. You thereby set up more chasings as the enemy sneaked around the edge of the barn and then belted someone with the ball just caught, preferably on the back of the head. Even this game got boring and we all ran out of cousins to bean…and besides, a mystery was developing; the older cousins were disappearing into the hay maugh as the hay was continually hoisted off the horse wagons. Uncle Emil’s giant brown Clydesdales, Toivo and Ole, were unstoppable. They reminded me of Uncle Emil as they knew nothing but work and work harder. The job of the older kids was to stomp and jump on the hay in order to pack the winter fodder down and make more room in the maugh. It was a glorious task and only the older cousins were allowed because one year some male cousin slid into a manure fork which had been resting on its handle. For the rest of his life he was called “Spike”. That did not stop us younger cousins from sneaking a peak now and then. Over to one side there were a couple of converging beams which had formed a room. A window between the beams gave some light. Strange new boy and girl sounds intervened. I crawled over, the glorious smell of dried clover and chewing fescues attacked all childhood sensibilities. It was a Minnesota heaven of smells. There, in the half light were five of my cousins. One was Rose. She had her shirt off and her tiny breasts were exposed. My male cousins were saying something like, “Let me have a squeeze Rosie,” Peter said, “…and me…and me too,” George chimed in. Cousin Rosie saw me crawling over and said, matter-of-factly, “Oh, Buckie, you’re old enough now, you might as well feel them too, we’re related.” With that she took my hand and pressed it to her bee stings. I did not know why. It didn’t make any sense, Cousin Fat Charlie Olson had much bigger boobs than Rosie and no one ever wanted to squeeze his. I think mine might have been a bit bigger as well. But, I obediently gave them a squeeze and crawled away to my other cousins who were gaily and secretly playing chasings in hay-lined tunnels. They knew how to have a really good time. But I remembered, “Buckie, you’re old enough now…” My hay-crawling male cousins were waiting. “Did you feel them? Huh? Tell us about it…” I was an instant hero. Obviously something important had just happened and I was now old enough to rub a couple of bee stings! I was ageing but it made no sense at all. It was all really dumb.
It is only with careful hindsight that the gateways of ageing become apparent. Instead of a seamless evolution of merging usually forgotten incidents it is evident that the ageing process is marked more by lurches, wobbles and stumbles than steady and confident progressions.
It was about a year after the bee sting incident. I remember realizing at Uncle Charlie’s Swimming Hole that all of us boys were naked. That may seem pretty obvious, ten or twelve boys jumping off rocks, rolling logs into the water, throwing cow dung at bare bottoms. It was all just a glorious game…until, one day, someone shouted, “There are girls watching from the hazel bushes…”. They were screeching with laughter at the sight of boy’s nakedness. I saw Mary Ellen, an older and only third or fourth cousin, standing up brazenly. She appeared to be smoking. Only Fat Charlie did not run into the water…he now had such a big belly that his willy had disappeared. He had nothing to hide. Actually, Fat Charlie looked more like a girl. We got tired of standing in the water and the girls became tired of looking for nothing.
My lurch in the ageing process that day at Uncle Charlie’s Swimming Hole told me that we boys had something those older girls wanted…at least to look at. It still did not mean much to me. We were on our way to a soft ball game to play the Adolph Axes.
And so…the gateways came, were opened, closed and the roads taken always presented another gateway. Some gates were hard to open. Some were toll gates. Some fell away easily. Some gates were never quite unbolted. Some were too difficult to dare entry. The three worst early gateways for me involved death. My dog Turner was run over by the school bus. It was my fault. She was such a joyous little Jack Russell, always moving, always leaping, always licking, always non-obedient. Always at the foot of my bed. Always waiting for me after school. She never said a cross word to me. She loved to pick raspberries and only picked the really sweet ones. She had her own little drum inside; it beat very fast. I knew I was expected to put the leash on her if I was going to the shop. I knew it. I did not do it. The bus ran over her five feet from me. It ran over her head. I am crying right now because I killed my dog and have never been able to forgive myself. I buried her in the garden and gave her a good Lutheran burial using mother’s red hymnal. The wooden cross lasted a few years and the raspberries that grew over her always seemed sweeter. Father assured me that there were dogs in heaven. That was one hard lurch into coming adulthood. Right now I am little boy.
And then came the war. The wonderful and exciting war. Most of my uncles and older cousins had been in the last one. Now was the chance for us. With any luck, we thought, the war will last long enough so we can become heroes too. So many heroes, most of them cousins, two of them brothers. We were going to sweep the world from the yellow hordes of Asia and the Bosch of Europe. We would be on the front lines like our heroic great, great, great grandfather who had allegedly fought with General Washington in the Revolutionary War at a place called Brandy Wine in Pennsylvania, close to where father was born.
The war was fun until the cars outside our house announced that something was wrong. Two of the cars were painted khaki brown. Brother Adam had been killed in action somewhere in the Indian Ocean, wherever that was, and we would never see him again. He died because a Japanese submarine sank his ship. I remember that lurch of ageing surrounding our house was like a heavy Lake Superior fog in late August: completely enveloping and obliterating feelings. Numbness. At least Second Big Brother came home from the war and he brought me a genuine Japanese dagger. It did not seem to me at that time that things were getting better and better. Indeed, things were grim.
And I now had my own pubic hair. Troubles beckoned.
Buck Thor Emberg
Buck is a traveller. He and his wife Joan began their travelling life together 37 years ago. They have lived in twelve countries and travelled in 126. Buck sees himself as a humourist with a philosophical bent. He recently completed his PhD in Tasmanian History and holds other degrees in Philosophy, History and Theology but still sees himself as a boy from a dirty little railroad village close to the border of Canada…on the USA side. He has been a cleaner of railroad spitoons, brick carrier, football player, teacher, city planner, clergyman and has been trying to retire for decades. For this he has always failed as the next book or work has already started and he has never been able to keep a job.
In this work, Old Age Ain’t for Sissies, Buck takes us travelling with him and Joan across Australia and North America as they attempt to retire. His humourous philosophy is scattered throughout the book as bits of home-spun truths and gleanings from other writers and thinkers. He refers to himself as a Kierkegaardian Existentialist…which essentially mean his mind and life come straight from the Chaos Theory. This is a work about how to or how not to retire.
Buck is deeply involved in the environmental problems of Tasmania and belongs to a number of conservation groups in which he is very active.
We would like you to take these trips with Buck and Joan and certainly respond with comments or additions if you wish. He may be reached by email at:
[email protected]
These installments of the serialized book continue fortnightly.
Get on your philosophical bicycle and join them.
