It’s hard being old. You’re tired all the time. You know when you are young and full of life. You probably are young and full of life! Well, when you wake up in the morning and you’ve slept a little funny, you feel achy and need to stretch out before you are at the top of your physical game for the day. The difference is when you’re old, there’s no stretching out- you need to plastered yourself against the radiator or spend an hour in the bath to quite literally warm your bones!
I try not to complain. Ok, I endeavour to myself everyday to not complain. But I always complain. Tell you what- you get old and try to not complain and see how far it gets you?
I need my complaining.
The phone rings.
Hi Dad, it’s Peter.
Hello Pete lad, how are doing son?
Not to bad Dad, got that promotion but not sure whether it’s the right time. How are you feeling?
Oh god lad, the left knee is killing me today. I tell you, I tell you what it sounds like. Remember, remember, the mark one your mother had, the battered up cream coloured one, well champagne she used to say. Well anyway lad, me left knee, by god lad it sounds like the engine on that mark one. The doctors coming out to look at me, MOT you know, ay lad we are like knackered up cars these days. I’ll make sure he checks me levels!
See, dear reader, here we have a beautiful- exceptional example of; elderly repetition, the tangent and the pensioners art of moaning!
I love a good moan, I don’t have much else to say- lets be honest. Day to day conversation, as a young man I would talk of my careers prospects, my possibilities with the local girls, thoughts of grandeur of what the future might hold. As an older man, hitting the middle ground of life- with my wife at my side, my children at my knees. I would talk of our hopes for the kids, our plans for the year, for the next ten even, we would share our worries of financial collapse, marital ruin!
But now,I don’t have worries or plans for the future. My worries and plans have played out already. I am at my final chapter. I think our final chapters if scribbled down in a figmented glorious human biography would be entitled Memories and Aches.
You may think I am a silly old man, I am! You are most certainly correct. But your final chapter will be filled with aches- to use the word pain here is far to strong and also would draw up far too many connotations of emotional suffering and despair. Memories both new and old- mainly old, you will live in these memories, bad and good. We already as human being cannot control our stream of consciousness to a certain extent. My granddaughter tells me that I am wrong, that if you are that ‘sort of person’ whom can control their thoughts, she breaks her flow here and states.
Grampa, you know the sort of person who studies maths and science, the sort of person who can view the world in black and white.
Here I think she is so perfectly correct. The sort of person who doesn’t disappear into rose tinted memories of years gone by, the sort of person who can look into the future as the decline into illness and certain death, to miserably endure every moment until life is taken from our mortal dwelling thus leaving nothing but the carcass.
I replied to my granddaughter.
You are right my darling. I shall stick to my poetry and literature. I will continue to see the world in the gorgeous multi-hue I always have!
Loud Words 