Age

Age & Aging

    Until  the last fortnight, I think I treated life as everlasting, and myself as immortal. Not explicitly and to the letter, of course, for I know that there is an allotted span to the life of man; that, barring accidents, "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow;" [Ref1]. I know also that "80 is the new 70", or some such figure, for we are definitely living longer than our grandparents (on average). But in many other ways I completely ignored the fact that I was hurtling towards my end. 

    As a youth I did not contemplate death, but life rather; nor did I notice forgetting, but rather I thought of myself as learning. And, until quite recently, I thought of myself as learning still. Also, that I was playing my fiddle better each year; by guile, perhaps, if not by dexterity. I did not write a will until I was 60, and even then I wrote it only because I was setting off on an adventure. (A minor adventure, perhaps, but still cut off from the security of 'home'. And every billion plane embarkations yields 73 fatalities.)

     I do not know what, in the last fortnight, triggered this change of viewpoint. Perhaps I suffered a mild stroke? But I think not. Or was there a step-change in my biometric data? Again I think not.  I packed my suitcase for 10 weeks in Mexico as I have for the 10 years past, using my list of things-taken-last-year. And still I forgot to pack my UK ➙ USA electrical socket adaptors; no doubt because I was concentrating so hard on switching off the gas, while clutching my passport. On my last evening with my son and daughter-in-law in Brookline we tuned up two fiddles and a mandolin only for me to discover with horror that I could no longer sight-read; even in the first-position. What then is there left to live for?

    Imagine a stream, which I could normally take in a stride. I have slowed of course, but still can leap the stream. Then comes the day when such a leap seems out of the question, and I am cut off. It is an all-or-nothing thing. 

    For a week now I have been living with this new undercurrent to my thoughts. That, if I only have another decade, and if I am to write anything worthy, I shall have to plan my time rather rigorously. If, for example, I am to solve (for myself) the Coriolis force and the pKA of water, if I am to tighten, lay-out and transmit my (perhaps important) views on morality, let alone politics; I must focus. I must forego those happy but time-wasteing computer-sessions with Sudoku, or Duolingo, and those TV drama series set on Caribbean islands. I must delegate (if I can) the time-consuming tasks I do for the Historical Society and the local Quaker meeting. 

    But this morning, as my accustomed time for morning coffee found me roaming the cereal section of a supermarket, I realised I was feeling a whiff of faintness. Two minutes later, as I watched the second-hand bookseller raise the shutters of his higgledy-piggledy shop, a second deeper wave forced me to push rudely past him muttering something about "Silla" and "Necesito sentarme".  And I thought to myself, what if not even a decade but three years! What if I am allotted only one year!!

    I went my wiggly way up to 'La Milla' and ordered an café americano and an almond croissant which was brought to me up on the little roof garden that looks out over Calle General Molinos del Campo. There, no longer experiencing a trace of faintness, nor indeed of morbidity,  I sketched these few paragraphs. And plotted an Essay on "The Brick Wall", and another on "Pocket-calculator Science", and another on "The Search for New Music". 

[Ref1] Psalm 90, v. 10