Ageing Population

Last night's reunion dinner was hilarious. It all began when one of my uncles somehow failed to realise that he was a senior citizen. A man of the diving-camping-roughing it out kind, he isn't particularly frail. But he is a septuagenarian. Of course, Eldest Aunt, into her rather vibrant and active 80s, laughed at him with all the aplomb of someone who looks sub-60 and feels even younger (apart from the wisdom of ages). At one point, she made the crack, "So I don't get to go (camping) anymore because you think it's too tough for the old lady eh?"

The discussion meandered through multiple strands of medical lore and the high politics of the Atlantean priesthoods, chiefly because we eventually figured out who his camping partners were. Through it all, I was thinking, "If this is old age, I should be preparing to carry a reasonably high level of physical and mental fitness into my next forty years or so."

Meanwhile, however, I'm nursing some sort of deep tissue upper arm injury. There's a certain point (Eldest Aunt says it's 40) at which the human body naturally develops all kinds of random susceptibilities. Arrhythmias, bad eyesight, odd fluctuations of the senses and the metabolism, that kind of thing. This injury probably comes from acting like you're in your 20s when you are actually a lot older.

I've also been reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut. He's entertainingly agnostic and one of the most humane writers I know. He writes like Ray Bradbury, but with less of Bradbury's sometimes poisonous sting. I began reading Vonnegut in my teenage years, and books like Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-5 were an integral part of my adolescent experience. It was partly from him that I've developed a remarkable level of sanguinity about my infirmities. They don't matter as long as I'm not a parasite and I can help others be happier than they'd otherwise be.

Cat's Cradle

I will miss this old man, this venerable and ever-kind paragon of modern literature. For Kurt Vonnegut is dead, is dead, and all the trees are barren now. He wrote fourteen novels, each a crystal of painful satire, each a gem of distilled Zeitgeist. He witnessed the firebombing of Dresden at first hand. And yet, he was a free man in his mind, never overcome by the weight of life.

I will miss him because, with his friend Joseph Heller, through the mediating influence of my maternal grandfather, I learnt about life. Not the platitudinous or the scurrilous, not the acrimonious or the cynical, but life as a raw deal which just might turn a profit for you. And all about taking flying leaps at a doughnut, or the moon, or a B-52 bomber.

And although I could include many links at this point, I will not. He made the reader think independently; in his memory, go and find your own links.