A case for Gemini, Google's man-living-in-a-barrel who loves tough questions. In fact I belong to 0.6% of the UK population which sounds tidgy enough to be rather special. Alas, when the percentage is re-stated in numerals I find myself one out of 625,000 souls and thus quite commonplace. Small confession: given my age I prefer to be called a "soul" rather than the fleshy, baggy collection of friable bones that is reality.
Two decades earlier I'd have been a rarer voter; UK nonagenarians have doubled in numbers since then.
I'm older than the tiny band of faithfuls who read Tone Deaf, so, what's it like being four-score years and ten (actually eleven)? Ignore the obvious stuff which I won't go into: forgetfulness, a corporeal structure which groans and creaks, a growing impatience with those who use language carelessly, diminished enthusiasm for cheap wine, a lack of interest in gardening that has expanded into a hatred... you can guess at all that.
But how about a more appreciative response to aspects of beauty in older women? Is this somehow crass, or anti-feminist? I hope not. What I see is calmer, less blatant. As a twentieth-century Shakespeare might have said: these gliding, more detached adults wear their rue with a difference. The problem - for me - lies in articulating any such observation. Thus - you're not going to believe this! - I am uncharacteristically silent.
I may not walk as I once did, without concentration. The likelihood of tripping is greater and the penalties more destructive. Sometimes it's as if I'm on a tight rope. Children overtake me. Men and women at doors, a long way off, see me coming and wait - often inordinately - holding the door open. I murmur my thanks and think: lento.
I have developed an insane desire for made-up potato salad. Faced with a choice I would prefer it to lobster, previously the height of gastronomic indulgence. Thank God it's cheap.
I have a foolish, utterly unjustified, belief I can speak mathematics. That equations are poetic. That I can terrify my liberal arts acquaintances with my knowledge. As with James Thurber: people often just walk away.
Death has become a neighbour. The sort that takes in one's undelivered parcel. Points out tomorrow's garbage collection day. Brings round a sponge cake still warm from the oven. Smiles and brushes away thanks with the least demonstrative of hand gestures.
My writing is, I think, more ambitious.
I've never met a potato salad I didn't like. Left to my own devices I would also buy it from the deli section. It is nice you have developed this yen for potato salad. It could be so much worse.
ReplyDeleteColette: I chose this enthusiasm because it seemed such a humdrum foodstuff to get excited about. Had I chosen, say, lobster that would have been more predictable. Even now I can't quite understand why I find myself in thrall to potato salad but the fact is it's almost impossible to resist gobbling the whole container-full (Half a kilo!) in one go. I find it strange that you too share this unexpected desire but on reflection it may be part of link that - over the years - seems to have drawn our personalities closer and closer together. And this I regard as gratifying. Perhaps it's as well that the Atlantic Ocean is as wide as it is.
DeleteThis post does seem unusually brilliant. I chuckled a couple times today over the “open goal” question from last time. Thought to comment on it, but arrived to find this latest gem. It made me forget the open goal thing and I had to go back and look it up.
ReplyDeleteMikeM: A few weeks ago I responded to one of your Tone Deaf comments over-critically and this led to an ominous silence from Upstate New York. Now I've bloody-well done it, I told myself as I reached for a miniature bottle of vodka I received as a Christmas table present in 2020.
DeleteThus, your present comment was most welcome yet - simultaneously - strange. Strange in your choice of adjective, since I set out - in compiling this short list of phenomena - to be brilliant and thus justify the single-sentence paragraph that ends the post. Even stranger is the fact that "open goal" caught your eye; I came within a few seconds of deleting it, thinking it too elliptical to be understood.
You'll notice in my re-comment to Colette (above) that I talk of our personalities as drawing together. Something similiar seems to be happening with you and me. Again this is gratifying for me at least. At my age and state of decreptitude pleasant changes tend to be rare