Open Writing

The main thing about feeling immortal is that it does not last forever – the feeling, that is. The sense of indestructibility wanes, which, in and of itself, would be tolerable were it not for the hints that jump out of the woodwork, and other places, to take me by surprise. Even Death should know that it is impolite to keep reminding a fellow that his days are numbered, even if no exact number is given.

As with other unpleasant manifestations to which the flesh is heir, a series of events is contrived to bring a chap’s attention to his inevitable decline and expiration. The first indicator of my slow march to the grave came early one morning on Tuesday, the eleventh of June, nineteen ninety-six. So silently and sweetly did it appear, that it not only took me by surprise, but slipped past my critical faculties with such speed that it took me some time to fully comprehend its meaning.

I was travelling back to Huddersfield from Seattle. Norma and I had spent three weeks in America visiting Pamela. We drove to Wyoming to attend Curt’s marriage to Anita, and visited Andy. My three weeks holiday had ended and I had to go back to work. I left Norma to spend a further seven weeks with her daughter on Vashon Island in the Puget Sound.

The journey home was uneventful, always the best way to travel. I cleared the airport with my bags, and caught the train. In Manchester, I had to change trains. During the twenty or so minutes wait on a Boer War vintage platform, I met a young lady who was catching the same train, but going on to Leeds where she worked in insurance. We struck up a conversation.

Once aboard our train, we sat opposite each other at a small table with the obligatory ripped and pot marked leatherette covering. Our talk was personal but light. We spoke of our families, our jobs, and of how simple congeniality and consideration for others were essential elements in fulfilling the measures of our creation.

Emerging from the darkness of Springwood tunnel into the brightness of Huddersfield’s railway station, I rose, said a cheerful goodbye, and went to leave. My companion of less than an hour leaped, not too strong a word, and took my two pieces of luggage from the rack by the door, and sprang from the train to deposit them on the platform.

When I caught up with my luggage, she threw her arms around me and gave me a smiling hug before springing back onto the train, waving from the window as it pulled away, leaving me standing there bemused as to why this thirty-something girl had carried my bags from the train.

My arthritis was in seventy-five percent remission at the time, so I did not think that I looked too disabled to see to my own travel bags. I had my suitcases taken to the egress, hailed a taxi, and was halfway to Fartown Bar before it dawned on me that the young woman had perceived me as an elderly man! Odds bodkins! I was shocked.

I was sixty-one and reasonably active for an arthritic. My once-crippling angina was a thing of the past; I sported a good head of hair with gentle, fetching waves, and had all my own teeth except five, with three paid for pressed men serving in strategic positions so that only those who know me really, really well knew that I was not orthodontically intact.

Those who are in on my secret include my grandchildren, for whose delight I dislodge my chromiumed cobalt-steel half plate, turn it through a hundred and eighty degrees, poke the upside-down teeth through pursed lips, and make silly faces, restoring my upper central incisors and an associated rightside canine before their parents can catch sight of me in flagro delecto, which vision inevitably forces them to behave as parents do when their small children are being entertained by an adroit in the arcane arts, but whose sense of propriety fell off some miles back.

That I had recently thrown in the towel and gone for a SpecialEyes™ Special Offer to save my friends and flitting vehicles from the vagueness they had assumed over the past half-year, should not be taken as an admission that my eyes had become old and weak. That would be a deprecatory misapprehension of my ocular competence. I only got the glasses to see which of my friends were growing old because their faces were becoming unflatteringly vague.

So I was left with the puzzle of what makes a spry thirty-something think that a not-too-hesitant sixty-something is elderly and in need of assistance? I consoled myself with the thought that she had misread my mellowness as feebleness, and had read the few faltering steps I had made on account of jet-lag as signs that my skleleto-muscular system was no longer capable of holding this old codger together in a systematically functional way. "Well," I grunted to myself, "we all make mistakes!"

That, as I said, was the first sign. It came, as did Jacob Marley’s Ghost, to a man at peace with himself and the world. But, after its appearance, just like Ebeneezer Scrooge, I was a changed man.

Whereas the thrice-apparitioned-Ebeneezer looked more closely to his heart, his relationships, and his generosity, I, a mere once-visited-geezer, looked more closely at my wrinkled skin, my balding pate, and my tortoise-like neck. Ooer!
- - -
This morning, a little over nine years after the first visitation, I met the second of my pending extinction portents in the guise of an cadaverous alien nonagenarian who was cunningly hidden on the other side of the pump island when I stopped to fill up. The revenant had a brand new Chevrolet as big as the town hall. "There’s style," I reflected, in a Welsh accent.

As I took out my bankcard to start filling, he called to me. Had he beckoned to me it would have been with a bony finger. Instead, he called out to me with his bony voice!

"How do you get these things going?"

"Have you swiped your credit card?"

"No. My wife’s inside the store paying for it."

"You didn’t use a credit card?"

"No."

"I see." I didn’t see.

I was as stuck as he was. I poked at all the yellow octane rating signs, and he followed with his bony fingers doing the same, just as I had done. Neither his poking nor my poking made the pump work. With his ten bony (and my ten youthful) digits in a combined and, it must be admitted, often confused effort, we couldn’t get the consarned gauge to return to zero.

His wife appeared. She was somewhat younger, probably in her late eighties, with a friendly smile.

"They’ve switched it on." She had a gentle voice. She was probably his navigator, in charge of the GPS to ensure they didn’t get lost as they hunted for the overdue souls on their short list..

"What?" Said my spirit, although I had not at that moment identified him as such. In like manner of all my understanding, that would come later.

"They’ve switched the pump on inside." she said.

As one man, the gaunt, lanky, and bony stranger and I turned to look at the convenience store in which, according to his fellow spirit, a pump had been turned on. Why we did that, I have no idea, but it seemed to me the sort of thing my Granddad Bennett would have done when he didn’t know what else to do.

I ruminated anxiously in Welsh, :"Good grief, Boyo. You are become your granddad, isn’t it?"

The pair engaged in muted conversation - presumably some kind of incantation uttered to bind the located soul – so, sensing my redundancy, I returned to my side of the island to fuel. After explaining my absence to my dogs, who had come to stand with their heads out of the rear side window, their tongues even further out, I started pumping. To do so I had to flip up the cradle where the dispensing nozzle rested when not in use. Eureka! Had I been at bath at that moment, I would have de-immersed and run to tell the good news.

Patting my dogs’ heads in apology for a second abandonment, I returned to the other side where the conversation between Mr and Mrs Ghost of "You-Ain’t-Long-Fer-This-World, Pilgrim" – whose unspoken message I was beginning to take seriously - had stilled into what I presumed was their customary taciturnity.

As if I had discovered the flaw in Einstein’s theory of relativity, or the fifteenth planet of our solar system, or the formula for determining the displacement of vessels in water, I flicked up the cradle on his pump with a fully mortal flourish, and the mechanism whirred into life.

A few more seconds explaining to my tormentor that there were three hoses and three handles, and the one he had in his tank was from the unleaded pump, which is what he wanted, he filled up and drove away. No doubt, he had other trysts to keep before his day's work was done: other visits to make to the unexpecting, other unsettling and cryptic messages to not-quite deliver.

It was only after he showed me a clean set of stainless steel tail-pipes that the full import of our transaction hit me. Even with both our minds, we could not do what a four-year-old could manage: switch on a petrol pump without being prompted! I knew then that the time of my taking was not far distant and the bony man was sent as a sure portent, perhaps even a stark image of what I might become.

Driving home, the words of Alan Seeger’s rich-storied and prophetic poem raced through my mind,

"I have a rendezvous with death
at some disputed barricade…. "

It did not strike me as morbid then, and it does not do so now. There is triumphant amusement in being instructed that although my unspent time might not be short, it is nonetheless in limited supply, and I had better make the best of it because, ready or not, come it will! The triumph comes from accepting the sentence with good humour, and without hesitation or dread.

In the meantime, life goes on. Even as I contemplate in what form and when my third attendant will reveal himself, I shall finger-wave my last wisps of hair, eschew the vain but futile comb-over, continue to lose weight, wear eccentric but flattering clothes, trim my eyebrows, remain optimistic, love well, and be as pleasant as an old man can be, despite the insults of a deteriorating body, the long silences of a steel-trap-mind whose springs have failed, and the burden of a sometimes exhausted will. I have determined that no matter how Death shall treat me, he shall not make me afraid of him, and that if he will not smile at me, yet shall I smile at him.

I also have it in mind to chide him for not being more straightforward in the messages delivered by the first two angels, and hope that I can at least compliment him on being more straightforward with his third and final message. I hope also that his style will have improved to the point where he can employ flair without embarrassment, dress himself to be instantly recognisable, look me straight into the eye, and tell it straight. I can take it as it comes.

Just I recognise that my immortality is not to be found in this world, I am just as sure that when I shuffle off this mortal coil, I will then grasp the immortality I imagined I had when I was but a careless youth. In a perverse kind of way, I look forward to the next Great Adventure.

Copyright © 2005 Ronnie Bray

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED