Even Groundhog Days are different
Watching your own parent travel into old age is a strange process, a bit like looking down the list of notable people’s birthdays in the Times or the Telegraph, being surprised at how old some of the icons of your youth have become, or even marvelling that they’re still alive … and then realising that you personally are nearly as old (or perhaps even older) than they are.
This is undoubtedly because of the human condition. We go to sleep at night and, upon waking the next morning, (let’s leave hangovers out of this) feel and look in the shaving mirror exactly as we did the day before. Day to age we don’t appear to age. Others might, of course, but that’s their problem.
I remember vividly the time when (aged about forty) I went to stay with one of my oldest school friends and his wife – he by then a senior army officer – after a gap of maybe two or three years.
Ben was a large, bluff, fellow who had begun greying in his early thirties and was now edging distinctly towards the salt end of his natural ‘salt and pepper’ barnet. Immediately I walked in the door he emitted an exclamation of triumph at my appearance – “At last you bastard, you’re greying at the temples!”, a greeting that at the time I found mildly offensive.
Upon later reflection, however, I reckoned that I worked out just what had been going on. Presumably genetically programmed to begin going grey – which in the eyes of many is a signal of mortality and a defining stage along the ageing process – prematurely (if thirty is considered prematurely) – Ben must have been both self-conscious about it and envious of his contemporaries who hadn’t been similarly afflicted. I was one of them. Hence his bellow of satisfaction when I finally displayed my first evidence of ‘joining his club’.
However, from my angle, I had genuinely never regarded myself as luckier than Ben, or superior to him, because of my comparative good fortune (at sixty-four, I’m virtually snow white now anyway). Yes, he had been greying and I wasn’t but this didn’t seem something particularly worthy of note or comment. You might suggest “Ah, but it’s easy for you to say, isn’t it?” – rather like someone with a full head of hair would claim not to think less of a contemporary who was thinning or going bald.
As it happens, my father, who passed into his tenth decade yesterday, still retains a full head of hair whereas I am decidedly thinning on top and sport a bit of a ‘Friar Tuck’ on my crown.
The difference in our genes – my theory is that men inherit their hair from their mother’s side of the family tree (the majority of my mother’s male relatives were balding in one form or another) – has never bothered me in the slightest. I’m probably as vain as the next guy but I’ve never worried particularly about my signs of ageing when they have come along, or ever engaged in a quest to wear particularly fashionable or smart clothes (some of my pals might add here “Yes, we’d noticed!”).
However, when I once remarked upon my father’s unusual ability to seemingly hang on to every single hair his head has ever produced, his reply was fascinating. Firstly, he attributed this phenomenon to the fact that he had rarely worn a hat – he believed that somehow doing so promoted baldness. Then he went on to add that, had he ever begun to go bald, it would have severely damaged him psychologically. From a self-worth and self-esteem perspective, his hirsuiteness of the bonce had always been of extremely important to him.
I found this very puzzling.
Like most sons, as a kid I worshipped my father. Having been sent away to boarding school at the age of seven (the family was moving houses from Derbyshire to Surrey at the time and it seemed sensible to get me settled in my new school a term earlier than most kids) and with him regularly traversing the world on business in those days, he was a semi-remote god-like figure who without fail wrote each of his offspring weekly letters from whatever part of the globe he was currently in and then blew into our lives from time to time, made a big fuss of us whenever he did. Almost certainly, trying to live up to his example (or was it expectations?) was a big motivating factor in my life growing up.
Against this background, the possibility that in fact he was gibbering wreck of insecurities, amongst which a psychosis about losing his hair was a primary concern, seemed bizarre in the extreme.
Yesterday I attended an annual sporting tournament at which my father traditionally attends the lunch.
At his advanced age he is, of course, something of a shadow of his former self and it is this subject that I’m posting about today. When someone has been as important a fixture in your life as a parent, it’s quite difficult to get your head around the fact that he or she is no longer how they used to be. Even though logically and intellectually one knows and accepts that this development – this stage of life – is inevitable whenever someone happens to have a long and event-filled life.
It’s just one of those weird things about life that every day we exist we are exactly the same as we were the day before … only that we aren’t really.
