Older than time (and Sun Tzu)

There are some notable people from history who died at the age of 48.

I mean, people in history are supposed to be old, right? If you’re in an oil painting or a black and white photo, that adds a hundred years to your age. It must take decades to accumulate the kind of fame that translates to history books and statues, to odes and tributes.

I’ll give you some context.

Sun Tzu (author, The Art of War) and Khalil Gibran (The Prophet). Dead at 48.

People as disparate as Whitney Houston and Al Capone. Dead, 48.

An entire monarch! Charles l, King of England. Cecil (damned) John Rhodes. Graham Chapman of Monty Python.

Hey, man, you guys all died at the age of 48.

My own longevity benchmarks are people like Elvis, dead at 42, and John Lennon, 40.

Hell, Paul McCartney has been alive for nearly twice as long as Lennon was.

Forget the 27 Club, those kids with lives swallowed by drugs, booze and bad driving (Hendrix, Cobain, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones), or even that idiot heroin addict Sid Vicious – dead at 21, there are swathes of people throughout history whose lives ended less glamorously in their thirties or forties.

It’s no longer a tragedy if you make it as far as your forties before dying.

According to a whack of articles and estimates we are given the expectation that we’ll live into our 70s in a first-world environment.

That means middle age, as a concept, should cover about a decade somewhere in our thirties.

The thing is, a decade sounds like a long period. We’ve grown up with reverence for the 60s, 70s and 80s as if they’re a cultural talisman instead of a blur of fashion, music, architecture, art and design. A decade passes like a whim.

I may have a couple of decades left. Maybe. Too few years to leave an iconic stain on history, that’s for sure. It could even just be months that I have left.

But you guys who died at 48 or younger? I beat you suckers.

You’re probably younger than I am – almost everyone is, these days, but take a moment to consider that your age is a rug that gets pulled out from under you before you can say “happy birthday”.

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be remembering making forts for my plastic figures out of string and twigs and chewing my teddy bear’s ear. I vividly remember the toothmarks on my sippy cup, so don’t speak to me of legacies.

I’m still a child.

49 tomorrow.

A whisper is still spoken

The black dog is restless, backwards and forwards against the fence, sniffing furiously at unseen, anticipated forces. Sneezing occasionally and bucking its head. Its breath is warm and rank, meaty.

There, far beyond the gate, a path leads up to the meadow where daffodils grow in the more sheltered parts, a patch of yellow narcissus. The flowers nod at their reflection in the stream when it whisks down the spring rains, heads bobbing in acknowledgement of their own fugitive beauty. Transitory.

The peaty soil beneath the bulbs is rich with winter’s preserved decay, earthworms diving in and out of thrusted tunnels with blind glee.

Grey clouds tumble in on themselves like dirty sheets in a washing machine, rolling and falling over the hills and promising sheets of rain in the afternoon, maybe sooner. The sun is undecided, casting bursts of intense heat and then retreating.

Longer blades of grass cow down in the breeze, forming a network of sacred arches under which spiders hurry themselves to supplication, forelegs fussing at the disturbance in the air, their dew-laced webs like lacy lingerie rumours set to entrap unthinking flies.

Before the rain comes in force, its scent is driven ahead, a petrichor spirit summoned from the soil itself in some mystical vacuum. It’s a promise all on its own.

Up in the sky, a single leaf spirals – if you could see such details, you’d note a ladybird that has stowed away on it, bright red carapace and jet-black dots like the eyes of a demon. It’s heading out there into the storm without any understanding of where it’ll land.

Perhaps, it won’t land at all.

A kid, napping

“Terrible about that tanker fire in Nigeria”, I say to no one in particular. “Worse, still, there’s that story about the bird flu hitting ostrich farms in the Karoo”. It’s today. I can see that by the date on the top right-hand side of the newspaper. Your face is next to it, eyes squinting as if unused to the light. I notice that your hair needs a trim; there are curls like spring tide waves over your ears and eyebrows. You’re holding up the Times. Proof of life, I guess.

It’s been a decade since you vanished on the way to the shop where I presumed you’d wanted to get a packet of chips or chewing gum. Some small treat to ease the passage of the day. It took a couple of hours to notice you were gone. I mean, how do you notice the absence of a person? There have been times when I barely noticed when you were in the room, fiddling with your phone or adjusting the volume on the Hi-Fi when a favourite song came on.

Then I remember how it was to watch you sleep, with your chest rising and falling with each breath, an exhalation of carbon dioxide that smelled a bit like a hamster would if it rolled in jam. Earthy and sweet. Years of childhood pass by with parents grading themselves on basic milestones: child can brush own teeth – does so without asking, child can actually notice a used tissue on a countertop and help it migrate to a bin. Small, meaningful steps towards adulthood.

In sleep, the face of a child glows like a peach in the warmth of the summer sun, pink cheeks, soft fuzz. A soft toy, misshapen by years of being held through fevers and accidents with the necessary washing those call for is tucked under your chin like a telephone, listening to the confessions of nightmares and dreams.

There’s no newspaper, of course. No proof of life required.

You didn’t disappear at all.

You just grew up.

One moment, an infant with hopeful requests for snacks, the next, an adult, closing the front door with glee at the freedom it represented.

I remember how I let my guard down a few months back. At a low ebb, I was standing crying in the kitchen. Sobbing, really.

You came to me and hugged me, comforted me, told me it will be alright.

My son. My grownup son.

It’s getting better every day, as The Beatles said. And we’ll get through this life together, kid, you and me – ridiculous in our adult suits in this fancy-dress party of a life.

Love you, son.

The Lasts

Firsts are remarkable. The first time you walk into a new city from a strange airport, the first time you explore a new kind of food. So many firsts still to do, but the lasts are often forgotten about.

Do you remember the last time you used crayons as a child, making those infernal wax sticks skid across a page without snapping in two?

Or that time your mum cut your toast into soldiers for your boiled egg while you fussed about bits of shell getting in the way until you crunched them like broken bird-glass in your mouth?

That favourite toy you had: for me, those Star Wars action figures whose forays onto homemade ziplines into forts made from shoeboxes and bits of foil helped ease my years until suddenly, they were… gone.

The blurry recollection of the last time you had a conversation with someone before they died and the gift of sharing a chat was gone.

The exact moment my last baby tooth exited my mouth?

The final installment on pocket money?

The time my teddy bear stopped speaking to me – and who knows what was said?

The day I sloshed my way through melting snow with my fingertips red and burning from the cold.

The end of a romance with a childhood sweetheart or a best-friend friendship that petered out.

The day I stopped using a microfiche or a landline.

The time a song that moved me dropped from my playlist.

The final time my child wore a nappy or I blew a raspberry on their tummy.

We actively choose the firsts we get to enjoy, but the lasts can sneak past you like a toddler dressed in a ghost sheet, with holes cut for eyes. Stumble, stumble… gone.

On the razor edge of time, reality is sliced suddenly into memory segments – samples on a slide we occasionally put under a defective microscope that can’t capture the entire moment.

Not often deliberate, more likely unacknowledged.

The last time.

An old pistol found in a field of wheat

I’m a

Breeze,

A scab on

Either knee;

A dead moth in a jam jar,

A three-wheeled toy motor car.

An elastic band too stretched to propel

A balsawood plane into flight or bind

A rolled-up poster in black and white of a famous impressionist painting that you’re

Supposed to colour by number.

A felt-tipped pen with no ink,

An oil stain on the concrete in the garage where a brown car parked,

Once.

A leftover half onion with its paper skin browning,

A wizened apple, shrivelling, frowning;

I’m a mark on the wall where a child once got sick and puked -

Too many sweets,

A piece of bubblegum pressed into the wall between two bricks.

I’m the ball of spit where an insect has frothed a nest between two sticks,

And the circular imprint of a place where a

Woodlouse walked.

I’m a go-go-ghost that dances in the moonlight,

A paisley curtain assuming life-billows in the

Night

A chipped mug that a dead person once sipped from -

Not when they were dead, of course -

That would

Be

Stupid.

In Temperance

The dogs are circling, tussling. They rush each other, scuffle and bounce back, haunches lowered, ears back, the whites of their eyes flicking from side to side. They’re at play, though, so their grins are strictly for show. In a tree above the garden there’s a pair of pigeons making a nest for the spring, a tangled, half-hearted bowl of twigs that’ll shelter their scrawny young. The wind blows last season’s leaves about in miniature whirlwinds. The air itself is unsettled, both warm and breathy and icy, whistling through the drainpipes.

The dogs canter away from each other, mollified by some unseen intervention.

A teal loveseat under the awning embraces an old guitar, its neck smooth with the slide of rough hands and calloused fingers, whose curled shapes call out thrumming chords and resonant tunes when the evening mood seems right. The body of the guitar has nicks and chips from being slung onto the backseat of cars like a summer fling or hefted into use when the beer has been flowing. Its gold label is fading with each year that it gains its voice, the strings buzzing with restraint against worn frets. An hourglass figure or a sensual eight, the curves used to being tucked into an embrace and brought to life.

There’s the guitar player, breathing out light clouds from a cigarette, the ash dusting his shoulders as he sits, thinking:

Air.

That’s what music is; a re-imagining of oxygen/nitrogen/argon, perhaps a little carbon dioxide thrown in. The music of the spheres an elemental inclusion of the very atmosphere and, finally, the stratosphere.

It’s corralled into harmonies and rhythms, songs and symphonies. Sly, simple tunes and grand, eloquent explosions. But, without air, it’s voiceless.

He taps out a gentle beat against his thigh, hearing the rise and fall of a melody in his mind.

Goosebumps and tears.

That’s what music is; a chemical reaction in the body that causes the pulse to dance against your wrist or nerve endings to hum with life. Just as anxiety can drive your physical responses, music can get into your pores with quiet intensity.

Your breathing can echo the rise and fall of phrases; in, out, in, out. Building up and subsiding with subliminal power.

All this, with air.

The cathedral-like inner workings of a string instrument with its vaulted ceilings and private alcoves, magnifying the gentle plucking.

The smooth trachea of the wind instrument, channeling human breath through its mystical curves.

The deep boom of a stretched drum vellum like a lung, transporting that unworldly vibration from top to bottom.

All this, with air.

The birds clasp onto their twigs and whisper romance as the hounds call out to a world beyond the boundary fence.

Just air.

Semper Fi

Practice, practice, practice. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Take the subway. Jump off at Seventh Avenue and you won’t have to walk too far. Reach, clutch, deploy. 

On the corner of Seventh and West 57^th you can stop for a corn dog, maybe a soda. At the right time of day, you’ll see career dog walkers with their packs, being towed like two-footed ploughs along the sidewalk, casting glances like seeds to the left and right: awareness isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

What you see comes in layers, each sweeping glance peeling away more until you’re fully alert to everything that’s around.

They say that ten eyewitnesses will present ten different opinions about what they’ve seen. A single male suspect can become a woman with a pram or a couple holding hands. A skinny kid skating morphs into an elderly guy with a cane. Dusk or dawn change the colours of a man’s complexion as surely as they shift the skies – a porcelain-white guy with red hair can become a black man with a shaved head under the yellow streetlamps – just depends on who’s doing the observation.

Same with vehicles. You’d think it would be hard to confuse a square-backed SUV with a regular sedan, but the tricks of the mind and memory can transform what we recall.

Gunshots. The flat blat of a shot is unmistakable, but is it a volley of two, three or four shots? Did an engine backfire at the same time? Did the sound of the shots echo against the walls of an apartment building to multiply them? An army vet will swear blind at the source of a shot and the weapon that discharged it. Heard it a thousand times before. An athlete will recognize the kick of the starter’s pistol and a sailor will know the bark of a flare. Many simply assume that gunfire is just construction work or perhaps a motor vehicle pileup.

Point is, what do we really see or hear in the snapshot of a moment?

Reach, clutch, deploy.

It’s about repetition, muscle memory. Engrams of the flesh that produce reactions faster than the mind can comprehend. Drop a glass fifty times and you’ll get better at catching it.

Ever been to war? So much waiting around with nothing to do and then you get spat out into action, no time to fight back laziness or exhaustion. In seconds you can go from being a dozing nobody to a hero, before your brain even registers that you’re awake.

Or you could be dead.

Routines, patterns, habits, conditioning.

The shine of a boot so glossy that you can see up your own nose if you look down.

The crisp fold of a pressed shirtsleeve.

The animal scent of a shining leather belt.

Everything has its place.

Until it’s displaced.


Don’t look for what’s always there, look for what’s out of place, what doesn’t fit in, and you’ll get it. A hair on the collar, stain on a jacket – a puddle on a sunny day.

The incongruity of conflict.

The subjectivity of inspection.

The ambiguity of experience.

Stay clear of the platform...

Old biscuits never die

My father was a biscuit man. Not the Gingerbread Man, although when the factory cranked up the machinery on certain days of the week, the sweet, sensual spicy aroma of the ginger that went into the biscuits would engulf the town, drifting over the fields where I played football; he worked in the factory.

Whenever I visited him at work, I’d be led to his office which overlooked the factory floor, passing workers at conveyer belts or the drums of chocolate that would be spilled onto the freshly baked ovals. The smell of baking and cardboard was embedded in the white walls and steel workings of the plant. The women would smile at us as kids as we wandered through the bustle, observing their activity, and my father would conceal his sense of humour behind a façade of gravitas and a white coat as he walked with the stride of ownership from one workstation to the next.

Biscuits brought us to South Africa, his skills as a production manager being in demand. He worked in the Baumann’s factory in Woodstock and then as manager at Baker’s in Johannesburg, at what he called, with pride, ‘the largest biscuit factory in the Southern Hemisphere’.

My older brother and I worked in the factory in Cape Town during school holidays, packing the warehouse or trucks, filching armloads of chocolate and sneaking cigarettes with the workers during breaks. The workers spoke another language, and, since we were still new to the country, we were mocked a little – they’d swear at us in Afrikaans and laugh.

The factory churned out endless supplies of the brands you know well, Lemon Creams, Marie Biscuits and the ubiquitous Choice Assorted that graced the snacks table of every NGO and PTA meeting ever held. It takes skill to get to the best ones first.

A memory: huge bottles of something named “cheese essence” were used to flavour crackers. A whiff of the contents was eye-watering, it smelled like a Long Street pavement on Sunday morning, tart and vomitous.

He’d bring home boxloads of biscuits and I’d eat the things by the packet. He also branched out as a manufacturer or distributor of other products. I recall the seaweed snacks he did in the 70s, awful musty things that would probably work well now. Chips in the style of Flings, only in bizarre flavours like raspberry or orange. Those didn’t sell well (I imagine), so we ended up getting vast quantities to enjoy at home.

I guess it was a happy life for him, in the factory. Supplying biscuits to every supermarket in the country, making sure the conveyer belts did what they were supposed to.

There’s a piece of me that will always remember the scent of baking biscuits, fresh cardboard boxes and cleaning materials. It seems a far cry from what we’re encouraged to do now – work in manufacturing – but it was a respected position back then – and we should still be in awe of the processes that go into producing our neatly packaged lives and the people who work to do just that.

The pic is of a die used to stamp out those crumbly squares.

Why, dad, why – did you never manage to fix the way the top biscuit in a package is always broken?

Why?

Hidden in plain sight

A gentle breeze so soft that it is seen rather than felt in the autumn air, flowers nodding in the hedges, leaves releasing their foothold and drifting to the ground; there’s a stubborn fog that’s turning buildings into movie-set facades, their angles concealed along with the depths within. The headlights of cars appear as soon as they are gone, slowly snaking into the grey expanse. Even the waves just visible on a truncated horizon slap themselves down in silence, a rhythm that can only be imagined.

On the path, a small bench has been placed, a careless rockery on either side. Into the wood, a small plaque has been screwed, its brass tarnished and dun. If you run your fingertips across the words, you’ll feel a silenced story come to view, if only for a moment: a dear relative, much loved – now gone –adored this spot, apparently, and this seat is to remember them.

Despite the picturesque placement of this memorial, it sees far more than the peaceful trajectory of seasons. An addict entered a final, dreamless sleep here just weeks ago, in exactly the same place where a child was conceived days later, in a breathless, hurried coupling that finished in giggles and hurried straightening of clothes. Children have climbed on it, cramming old sweet papers into its cracks, and an ancient couple use it every week as a resting spot along their stoop-shouldered journey.

When the path is empty, especially just before dawn and in the last light of the day, animals and birds twitch their way across the seat, squirrels with their scraps and fretful rubbing of paws and paranoid robins, sparrows and thrushes dart around, one eye fixated on their surroundings, jerky, clockwork motions.

Dogs come and go, lifting their legs and claiming each other’s territory in a meaningless cycle. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. And again, on their return.

Once a year a representative of the local council comes past with a clipboard, inspecting the bench for its structural integrity. He ticks off a box, gives the panels a caring slap and moves on, whistling something his father before him used to whistle, a tune picked up in the carefree seasons after the war.

The fog has lifted, now, and the sun is out.

In the distance, a family can be heard, taking a walk. Their shoes are scuffing the path and they are laughing intermittently.  They come into view, hurry past and barely spare a glance for this bench, tucked into its careless rockery.