Old Folks

Lately, I’ve been looking at old people and wondering how the hell they’ve survived.

The wrinkle-run blue woman at Checkers who must have paid 70 years of bills. The hip couple in Greenwich Village who seem to have made it through decades of love, loss and casually quirky hats. Two teachers on a train hurtling across North America recently retired from a lifetime of service.

All of them blow my mind because I’m only 30-something and I’m exhausted.

Not the kind of exhausted I can rest away in a series of great night’s sleep but weary, I think, to my bones.

The rub is, if I’m lucky, I’m going to have to come up with at least 40 more years of money.

I’m going to have to invest in people, time and ideas that will ultimately let me down, fall in and out of love with men who will irrevocably wreck my heart and, in between the paying for things, children possibly and the emotional turmoil, I may even want to become some kind of success.

So I guess I’m staring and awarding invisible medals because life is hard and it’s always Christmas.

Doesn’t it feel like that sometimes?

That you’re always walking into malls and having your mortality mocked before your self-worth is maimed in a tinsel explosion?

Now, I know Christmas is the obligatory season to be jolly but the problem with all those sparkling seasonal baubles is that they’re reflective. They make us look in, look back and consider just how well we’ve done with the gift we get every day.

Time.

There’s a little less of it left in 2017 and if, we’re lucky, 365 blank pages of it waiting to be assigned a character and colour in 2018 so, like many people, I’m wondering what exactly to do with it.

What to quit, what to keep and how best to angle myself towards the old folks I see in the street.

The ones who don’t seem completely bent by the relentless effort of living.

The champions who’ve sent their children to school from the economic depths of domestic work and whatever lies in wait after hopping off the back of a bakkie.

Those sometimes shaky though shining examples of life who’ve made it through and can still rustle up a smile, a laugh and a word of wisdom.

As I get older, though they notoriously become less visible, these are the people I’m starting to see more clearly.

The old folks standing out in the crowd of youth and those covetous of it, saying in the ocean of their eyes and their simple existence…

“Chin up, baby, you’re gonna make it.”