Getting older is no problem, you just have to live long enough.
Groucho Marx
I was filling in an online application form recently. At the time I wished that I could revert to typing in my date of birth. Nothing reminds you of your age as much as scrolling down to the year of your birth. As the cursor tumbled through the years and decades to 1954 I wondered what occurrences of note I had preceded. Following a brief chat with my friend Google I noted the following.
Elvis Presley launched his career the year I was born. I take no credit for either event. Like many others I celebrated the first breach of the Berlin wall in 1989. I barely noticed the start of its construction in 1961. At 7 years of age in Catholic Ireland I was much more focused on my First Holy Communion and the gifts, both temporal and spiritual it might bring. The need to contain Communism ran a poor second to the construct of a list of misdemeanours that I could safely reveal at my First Confession. The assurance of confidentiality from the seemingly omniscient Parish Priest had yet to be tested in the field.
I was toilet trained before Pampers arrived. I’m sure the mothers of the world wringing out tubs of acrid smelling Terylene nappies saw this as a momentous day greater than even the advertisers could imagine. Graduated from this early training, I grew and got educated without the benefit of Facebook and Google. I was never very good at science, but I have an excuse. I was 18 and had left school before the first hand held science calculator arrived on my Periodic Table. I was already in school when Xerox produced the first photocopier. We relied on well- thumbed hand-me-down books and rote learning. The absence of an immediately accessible artificial memory bank forced reliance on that provided by Darwin’s theory.
I remember drinking minerals out of glass bottles. We scraped together a small amount for returning the bottles to our local shop. Aluminium cans launched in 1960 had yet to arrive into our rural corner of Ireland and cut off this meagre income source.
The Beatles didn’t start until I was eight with ‘Love Me Do’. I waited until Sgt. Pepper and the more psychedelic seventies to appreciate the boys from the Mersey.
I was nine and still playing Cowboys and Indians with the Convent Road gang (Native Americans came later) when Dr. Martin Luther King gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy. We noticed Kennedy because of his Irish ancestry and his visit to his home place five months before. It was akin to losing one of our own. The trials of black people in America were a mere footnote in our white only rural idyll. We were still ranting on about the Saxon invader. I had only ever seen one black person as a child. This man stepped off the Cork to Dublin bus to stretch his legs during the half hour break. Within minutes a cross section of the village under tens surrounded him, staring open-mouthed and goggle eyed at what was for most of us a pre TV apparition. I remember his tolerant smile before he resumed his journey to a hopefully more integrated future.
On a positive note a couple of important occurrences arrived just in time for my teenage years. Radio Caroline, the pirate radio refuge for those of us who wanted to escape Big Tom crooning about his Gentle Mother sailed to the North Sea in 1964 and the miniskirt to meet other more primitive needs in 1965.
I was around before the first heart transplant, the first man on the moon, the first Big Mac and the first punk bands.
This limited and highly selective sample made me reflect on the ordinary lives with ordinary priorities that we continue to live while momentous occurrences drop into our world. We store our memories for recall later in life. Our memories are highly individual and personal and can differ from others who might have shared the same event. We can’t claim to remember exactly what happened. What we remember becomes what happened. We shape our own personal history that reflects the impact of events on us as individuals and the emotions that help glue those events together. I don’t speak Hebrew, but I know it has no word for history. The closest word to it is memory.
William Shakespeare subscribed to this individual commentary when he postulated that
“There is a history in all men’s lives.”
The discipline of history takes commentary and views from many sources and constructs an approximation of what actually occurred. Despite its scientific base, different versions of history emerge from different commentators and their biases. The insurgent from one point of view is a national hero from the other side of the wall. Terrorists become martyrs. The just war on one side is ethnic cleansing on the other.
Winston Churchill suggested that
“History is written by the victors.” and
Napoleon Bonaparte believed that
“History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.”
Historian Arnold J. Toynbee offered a comical definition when he suggested that
“History is just one damn thing after another.”
And so I don’t really want to hear that I am young at heart or I don’t look a day over whatever guess the person feels is appropriate. I am as old today as I have ever been and the youngest I will ever be again. I refuse to label lapses in memory as senior moments. I used to mislay my car keys and forget peoples’ names in my thirties just the same as I do today. My life, with all its imperfections, is a small link to history which I have decided to be proud of. Your life can be too. All you have to do is live long enough. The new motto is the older the better.
From now on age, for me, is just a number, old, if anywhere, will be in my head and from now on I will scroll down to my birth year with a sense of accomplishment.
The Scribbler Griffin 