WEDNESDAY, 3 DECEMBER 2003
My morning yielded several faces: the first was my own in the haze of a blotchy bathroom mirror; the second was the young face of any of the children in Number Nine Crooked Village; the third was that of the old man that looks like Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Min, behind his desk at the school at Number Nine; the fourth face belonged to a baby boy on the train back to Fengshan. This collection of portraits got me thinking.
I myself am a child of the early seventies. While I too had my daily portion of food then, as now, and breathed, and from time to time had something to say, I can’t remember much about that time. I need to consult history books and old newspapers to fill in the rest of the story of a time when most of what happened never infiltrated my consciousness (or that made little sense to my underdeveloped brain). Only later did I learn, for example, that BJ Vorster had been Prime Minister of South Africa during this period; Richard Nixon and then Gerald Ford the presidents of the United States; the pompous Leonid Brezhnev Comrade One in the Soviet Union; and Pol Pot Brother One in a country I would only discover two decades later on a world map. In other areas, as I would also only discover much later, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin had already left for the afterlife, Bruce Springsteen had jumped on a table and was the next day revered as the future of Rock & Roll, and the British Lions under one Willie John McBride had sown tears and sadness everywhere they touched a rugby ball.
I know all these things now because I read about them. It could just as well have been history of the Middle Ages if it weren’t for the fact that I was also on the planet at the same time.
The seventies was my spectator decade – even though I didn’t understand much of what was going on on the proverbial playing field. I spent most of my days during that decade in sandpits, locked in an old wreck in our backyard (my own fault), and at or near kitchen tables eating my body strong enough for the next decade.
I was still unaware of most goings on outside of my immediate environment during the first part of the eighties. By the end of the decade though I was old and smart enough to understand concepts like “The Cold War”, “Apartheid”, “The Communist is Satan” and “Nelson Mandela will become the first black president of South Africa”. My reading and writing skills had developed enough by 1989 for me to leave school, and I tried to sound clever when people asked me what the next step of my life was going to be.
In the nineties, I became a more active member of the community, and remain so in my own way during this first decade of zero. I am now old and bald enough that it’s not unheard of for other adults to ask me, “What do you think?” I am also wise enough to marry and have children (or wise enough to not do it), and to throw my two cents in the purse of Polite Society.
Now, the above is useful as a short biography of myself, but it is somewhat limited as a larger view of the proverbial “us” that live out our existences during this time. Although I like to think of the last decade and the current one – the years of my late twenties and early thirties – as my time, that is just a fraction of the truth. This is also the time that the children in Crooked Village feel the same sun on their cheeks as I do on my half-bearded face. Same with the baby boy on the train, and the grandfather who owns the kindergarten. We all live in this time.
Five hundred years from now it won’t matter that I was 32 on this particular day, the children 5 or 6, the grandfather 75, and the baby boy 6 months old. This time belongs to all of us, even though some of us can barely write our names, and others have signed their names so many times that they’d prefer if someone else does it on their behalf.
We tend to be very focused on our own age, and to classify ourselves according to a growing number of groups and labels. There are Toddlers, Pre-teens, Teens, Young People, Early Twenties, Late Twenties, Early Thirties, Middle Thirties, Late Thirties, Mid-forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Retired, Elderly, Really Old and Old Enough To Be In The Guinness Book of Records.
I myself fit in the early thirties compartment, and some days I’m relieved that I am not yet in my mid-thirties. I have friends in their mid-twenties (or as I like to point out to them, almost on the “wrong side” of 25). I also have friends in their late thirties, and some of my best friends are in their mid-forties (the so-called mid-life). I can honestly say that I am happy to be 32. I am glad that I am not a teenager now. I am also very grateful that I am not yet elderly.
The question is, what does it matter? Of course there’s a difference between 15 and 75, and between 25 and 55. But let’s look at everyone who is now, say, under 35. This includes myself, my two sisters, a few friends, the teens of today, but also the many snot noses at the nursery school. It even includes the 6-month-old baby on the train. Where will we stand in relation to each other in thirty years’ time (or those of us who will make it that far)? I will be 62; not exactly young anymore, but not yet elderly. My one friend who is now 25 will be 55. My two sisters will be 56 and 64. The lot at the school will be between 34 and 36 years old, and the baby on the train would have just turned 30. Although this last group will be the youngest of those who felt the sun on their cheeks today, even they will not be children anymore. Some boys will have more hair on their faces than on their heads; some of the girls could have their own teenage sons and daughters.
Sixty-two, late fifties, mid-thirties … we’ll all be adults of the Time and World of 2033. It is possible that I will conceive children that will be younger than the children of the kids who had their little arms around my leg this morning. But at this moment we all have our feet in this time – here and now. If it rains tonight, we’ll all feel it. If there’s an epidemic of some sort, it will affect all of us.
I am tempted to say I am only weaving this essay together to make myself feel better because my own years are relentlessly advancing. Or because I felt like Grandfather Ho Chi Min this morning when I looked at a two-year-old in a thick coat dancing on stumpy legs, his nodding head not much bigger than my knee. Or because I was reminded how far I’ve already gone down the road of average life expectancy when I noticed the baby on the train, sleeping blissfully, unaware of anything but the warm cosiness of his mother’s chest. But none of these things will change the fact that a difference in age between two people blurs as the years advance for both of them. It also won’t change the fact that institutions, conventions, and the external evidence of our existence will probably survive all of us.
The fact is that other people were here before us. Democracy, free markets, modern labour relations, cities that look as if they’re about to burst out of their seams, and people who don’t know what a cave or a patch of vegetables look like exist not only because of our own actions. We inherited this world. And it is our duty to do what we can to leave something to those who will reflect on the meaning of their existence 200, and 500 years from now.
Not I, my two sisters, my almost-on-the-wrong-side-of-25-friend, my middle-aged and late-thirties friends, the toothless in the kindergarten and on the train, or any of the toothless old men with long white beards will still be here in 200 years’ time. This – this is what binds us all of this time together. None of us lived in the time of Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte or Beach Walker X (disregarding theories of reincarnation or time travel for the time being). Likewise, none of the people who lived during the time of the French Revolution or during the Golden Years of the Roman Empire made it to Tuesday, 2 December 2003. They all died. All of them. With no exception.
It will therefore not be inappropriate to end this piece – for the sake of illustration – by asking what it matters today that a particular woman was on the later side of 25 in December of the year 1541, or what it matters today that an old geezer was in his seventies. And does it still matter today that a three-year-old child danced on clumsy legs to a forgotten tune 462 years ago?
Historical footnote:
“And,” someone asks 462 years from now, “what does it matter today, Wednesday, 2 December 2465, that a 32-year-old man was brooding over the value of his own existence late one afternoon in December of the year 2003?”
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