08 April 2003

OLD MEN FORGET I was reading about the 18-year-old British soldier who was killed in Basra yesterday. It seems that he'd wanted to be a soldier from the age of 4. I tried to remember myself at 18. I think I wanted most of all to be John Lennon & Bob Dylan. Well, though I tried hard & long, the morph didn't work out. The closest I got was ownership of a pair of chelsea boots & a corduroy cap. Now, not so far from retirement, I wonder still what I'd like to do most when I grow up. But now alongside the dreams & aspirations there runs at last that intimation of mortality that comes with the half-century (& then a little). It really kicked in on the death of my father 3 years ago - that sense of there being a point or a place beyond which nothing else, or everything else, lies. I wrote a couple of poems about it, trying to capture first with humour & then with something fiercer & more intense the notion of absolute existential change. BAD LIGHT STOPPED PLAY   Alan said (and Keith agreed) it's when you get past fifty that mortality becomes an issue. Wrists and fingers, one time nifty, stiffen. Easy catches miss you; once-demon bowlers slump in deckchairs sipping whisky.   Keith remarked (and Alan nodded) that, like smirking boys again, you're shifty when the girls walk by. Oh yes, they'll kiss you on acquaintance, but their smiles are misty, drifting, painted onto tissue. Forty-odd and rising, the scoreboard climbs to tickle fifty.     CLEAR BLUE SKY   My dad was a man of prose – a specialist: words used like gardening tools to fashion patterns in the earth. Language mattered: correspondence ran to pages - letters to the council; ‘thank you’ notes to nurses that read like testimonials. Even cards to the milkman came across like billets doux to an old and valued friend. And the writing: tiny box-shaped words in biro, whispering in lines, or gathered quietly in the margins, small-voiced but insistent, looking for truths.   When he knew that he was dying, he sat at the edge of his life, scribbling a commentary.  Twinges from a cancer hotspot got a note immediately, draped around the Guardian crossword clues or squeezed between the calculations in his ledger: where it hurt, for what duration, and, in imagistic detail, the character of pain (like a voice, like broken glass, an ache like winter rheumatism).  And, towards the end, in his little diary, potted phrases: “Slept well”, “Insomnia”, “Coughing still”.   For we who sat around his bed, it was the silence that confounded.  To the nurses plumping pillows, lifting cups from which he didn’t want to drink; to waiting family sifting through his laundry, fiddling with the radio, he said nothing.  All his words were spent just days ahead of the breath that carried them.  And then, the afternoon of the day he died, the clouds drew back, late spring appeared. Joan leaned back towards the window, smiled and said: ‘Look - a clear blue sky’, and we turned to see.   My father didn’t turn his head.  Whatever sky he saw was far behind in time, or maybe just ahead.  Whatever sky it was, no messianic veil, no chariots of fire obscured the view. His great abundance, just like ours, was absolutely empty – birdless, sunless, silent and ineffable, mocking the mad commotion down below.  He drew in breath, breathed out and said: ‘A clear blue sky’, floating the words on the sterile air like leaves.  He didn’t speak again; he died that night and, one by one, the stars went out, an alphabet, a lexicon, set free.     11:56:15 PM    comment []   This may or may not be a picture of my daughter Zoe cradling my (then) 3-day-old son Reuben. I'd be grateful for notification from any passing traveller as to whether it's upstreamed. 11:28:43 PM    comment []         FRODO HAS FAILED... 10:22:23 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Dick Jones. Last update: 14/04/2003; 06:58:32.