Wisdom and old age. The two things don’t just go together – despite how much we fossils would like to believe otherwise. Most of us just get more stupid as we get older and cling to memories of a past we have invented. This is not a segway into discussing a couple of sad geriatrics contesting a televised beauty contest – no mention of MAGA.
It’s just a rant with no real beginning or end. Or meaning. Or wisdom.
The wisdom prompt came from here but I’ve no idea if I followed any rules.
****
Wisdom. Highly overrated. Ancient knowledge. Old. Outdated. Memories of bygone glory. Just a tale, an old man’s story of the past – a foolish claim that different times might be the same. You should have been there, way back when the world was new and men were men. When black was black and white was white and women knew their place at night. When God was better understood ‘cause bad was bad and good was good and wars were fought on foreign land with those who wouldn’t understand and those who couldn’t see the light, all slaughtered in our noble fight for queen and country – thus we fought, the roar of guns outranking thought for niggers, communists and queers, with no spare room for new ideas – we knew all that there was to know, because the bible told us so.
How dare we even speak of love, and hide beneath a god above, excuse ourselves for fears and hates, delude ourselves that heaven waits. We’ve done our time, we’ve had our chance, as we stumble through this final dance. Our heart’s not beating, blood’s gone cold. There’s no wisdom in just growing old.
Here’s something that I wrote for a competition that popped upon my feed during a cup coffee. It was not a serious attempt to create anything noteworthy, and it took only the space of one coffee to complete (long black with milk on the side, no sugar) with no edit. The only requirements were that it be 500 words revolving around two people in some sort of relationship. It had to contain the words ‘needle’ and ‘uniform’ and something else I can’t remember.
At the time I was thinking about the childishness of war and sexism and tribalism and racism – but it’s hard to make much of a point about these things in 500 words.
Anyway, somehow I made the ‘longlist’ – I don’t often make lists of any length, so that’s why I repeat it here ….
*
We crawled to the very edge of the balcony, allowing just enough of ourselves to protrude, so that our eyes could stare down into the urban abyss and secretly observe the passage of pedestrians below. We were alone on the balcony – nobody there to later needle us for the crime.
“No-one can see us,” whispered Tom confidently.
“Or hear us,” I replied at similar volume.
“Correct.”
“So, why are we whispering?”
“I don’t know. It just feels right.”
Checking my timepiece: 0811hrs. Scheduled train arrival: 0817hrs.
“How long have we got, Ronnie?”
“Allowing three minutes for them to get out of the station,” I answered, “and another minute to walk below us, we’ve precisely ten minutes to drop time.”
“We’d better get ready.”
“Yes, we’d better. Have you got yours?”
“Yes, you?”
“Right here.” We each reached into our bags and carefully extracted the missiles and laid them gently on the concrete: 0814hrs.
“How many floors up are we?”
“Seven.”
“So how long will it take these things to fall seven floors?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed, “how much do they weigh?”
“That shouldn’t make any difference.”
“What? Don’t be stupid. Of course it makes a difference. And accuracy is vital!” I paused for dramatic effect, “T minus five minutes to surgical strike!”
Tom normally reacts positively to technical jargon, but this time he looked offended. “Theoretically,’ he pronounced, “weight has got nothing to do with it.”
“That’s ridiculous. So, a brick and a feather would hit the ground at the same time?”
“Yes. Sort of.”
“I don’t, sort of, believe you. But anyway, how long?”
“Not very long.”
Clearly the plan lacked precision. “And what about the targets?” I continued, “What speed will they be travelling? We need to allow for that.”
“Not very fast.”
“OK. Got it. So …. not very long and not very fast. Sort of. That’s it? That’s the sum of our research?”
Tom nodded.
Silence.
We saw them emerge from the station at 0820hrs, all wearing their uniform and chattering amongst themselves.
“Ronnie,” whispered Tom.
“Yes?”
“Why are we doing this?”
“Because they are girls.”
“Is that all?”
“And because we are boys.”
“OK.”
“And they go to a different school. Catholic.”
Then they were beneath us. “Now!” I called.
Six water filled balloons began their descent towards six first-form students from St Brigit’s Girls’ High. The plan was proceeding splendidly until about halfway down, when the wind, another factor we had not anticipated, intervened, and pushed the falling barrages out towards the roadway, where they would have burst harmlessly, if not for a heavily pregnant woman crossing the road.
Collateral damage.
The gesture, we decided in retrospect, had been largely symbolic. Two daring young men had hatched a clever plan and, by virtue of that plan alone, had made a statement.
The statement itself remained tauntingly ambiguous. We spent the following six years of high school avoiding girls from St Brigit’s High, continuing, for reasons we could not explain, to fear them.
*
P.S. I did not transition to the short list. No surprised there.
I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. Nothing much, probably. But if you have a spare moment (and believe me, you do have a spare moment) then find a little stream somewhere and sit beside it for a while. It might be nice.
****
You find yourself walking alone in a forest and you stop by the side of a stream to rest. You sit and lean your back up against a tree that’s branches stretch out over the water and intermingle with other trees and vines and bushes and rocks and moss as it reaches for the sky. The tree is old and her weathered bark scratches through your shirt and onto your skin in a not unpleasant way.
You are completely alone. You are deep in the forest and there is a mist rising from the stream but you feel like you could see for a thousand miles. You sense no past or future, no remorse, no ambition. No forward. No backward. Everything is motionless. There is an instant when you recognise that even your own thoughts have ceased.
But only for an instant.
For then you are aware that nothing, in fact, remains still. You cannot feel the breeze but there is enough of it to gently disturb the leaves in the trees such that they perform a dance above you and you realise that this is a once only performance and that no two such dances can ever be the same. Every tiny movement has its own reason for being and so the dance of a thousand leaves becomes so intricate before your eyes that it cannot be adequately described, much less repeated.
A single leaf becomes dislodged from its birthplace and you watch as it descends to earth. You recognise no fear or sorrow in its graceful fall, just a continuation of the dance to which there is neither beginning nor end.
Birds fly above you, stopping occasionally to balance like gymnasts on twisted branches, looking erratically about and exchanging coded melodies. Clouds are drifting by, high above the canopy, and you watch them long enough to see their mysterious reshaping, the whisps of frozen moisture reacting to the air and the sun and the rotation of the cosmos.
The stream is only part of this eternal movement. Within it little eddies form and dissolve before your eyes and sometimes the water even stops for a moment on the edges, as if briefly contemplating a return upstream, before being sucked back out into the maelstrom and ever onward towards the ocean.
You pick up a pebble and throw it into the centre of the stream, watching as the tiny expanding waves are reshaped by the movement of the water and by the protruding rocks and sticks and reeds or just by a breath of wind, winding its way through the forest. Perhaps you see a tiny fish, startled by the movement, dart across your vision. Perhaps the falling leaf lands softly on your little wave to commence the next part of its journey. The beauty of it all brings you to tears.
You pick up another pebble and throw it, attempting to produce a replica of the event, but it is impossible, for nothing is the same. Despite the accuracy of your throw the stone arrives at a different angle. The missile itself is of a slightly different shape and weight, disturbing the water in a different manner. The clouds have conspired to subtly adjust the shade, the colours have been altered and the air has become colder, one of the sticks has been captured by the current and is gone. You realise that you are throwing a different pebble into a different stream. And that the universe has moved on.
Fandango asked for something to do with a candleabra (here) and the very notion of it seems to conjor childhood nightmares for me. There’s a bit of Boris Karloff about it, don’t you think? The Adams Family used to own a lot of candleabras I believe.
So maybe, in a certain light, the congealed wax gathered at the base might be confused with blood and dried tears ….
Richmond Road 