Ninety

 

At the Sunday party at church for my mother’s birthday, the vicar said in his speech that in his previous parish (St John’s, Finch Street) he cared for the oldest living Australian, at 112 years old. This meant, he said to my mother (Dawn Harvey), that you only have 22 years to go. ‘Don’t speak too soon,” muttered a few observers amidst the general laughter. It was one of the more sensitive ways of declaring her great age without actually stating the number. Mother in reply, “I have just a few words”, said that being here (St John’s Camberwell) was the longest time she had ever been in one parish: thirty years. Covid has not yet shrunk my brain to the extent that I could still calculate, that is a third of her life. Such milestones prompt us to measure our own span against that of others. It is a simple fact, for example, that I will always be 22 and a half years younger than her, though nowadays it’s not her who seems old but me. This age development is reinforced by my teenage daughter, whose irritating talent for realism confirms that I am old, repeated at any time when she thinks it necessary to remind me, in case I’ve forgotten. When I was her age anyone over 30 was old, an English word meaning ‘old’; this is a perception that seems to pass down through the generations. Our laughter at the idea of aiming for 112 is the laughter of knowing, after years and years, a moment arrives when that’s not so important any more. Take King Charles, as we must, a person who shares his birthday with my mother. His mother’s obstinate determination to get on with it and break reign records, her refusal to buck the practice and abdicate in favour of him, sets brains expanding with thoughts about wisdom coming with experience and the merits of patience. That Mother might eventually receive a letter from Charles is about the least of her concerns. We imagine her receiving the letter with “well that’s all very interesting.” When she says “I have just a few words”, this is taken as a most unlikely prospect if you are anyone of her family and friends. Our weekend of birthday celebrations was volubility itself, in much the same way as hour-long phone calls with her frequently operate according to their own Pareto Principle of ratio 80:20 input. During such conversations you are likely to hear about every member of the family in order of news, achievements, travels, crises, &c. Memories, from as long ago as her own growing up in Ivanhoe and Mentone, then Blackburn and Ringwood, come into the present in a moment. Names from every decade, with stories attached, innumerable, rise bidden or unbidden, conversations where time frames collapse and age distinctions vanish. Sometimes we listen amazed at some extraordinary story from the decades, one we’ve never heard before, related by her as though it were common knowledge and happened only last weekend.