Edited by Gordon McLauchlan
Random House $45.00
Publication 4 June 2010
What a great idea of McLauchlan's to approach a bunch of fellow senior citizens, all eminent in their own fields, and invite them to write about growing old. It works wonderfully with the result making an entertaining and often inspiring read. And what an interesting collection of "oldies" he gathered together.
The publishers have kindly allowed me to reproduce part of McLauchlan's introduction as well as excerpts from several essays which should give you a feel for the book which is being published this coming Friday.
A great Queens Birthday Weekend read.
Foreword – Gordon McLauchlan (photo - NZH)
The assumption that age in itself endows wisdom is rarely expressed these days and very few essayists in this collection make such a claim. And yet all of them, I believe, offer a taste of the fruits of experience with a kind of reflective common sense. What most also do is express gratitude for the fullness of lives lived in this place at this time. Perhaps they have lived so well, so long and so fully because they have fitted so well into this place and time.
In seeking contributors, I tried to include a varied geographical and professional representation — with the obvious consideration that they should be people expected to write well and entertainingly.
I embarked on this project because I feel it is important our diverse opinions should be listened to and considered. In coming decades, the elderly — let’s steer away from euphemisms — will have an increasing say in the political policies that govern our collective lives. They will make up a larger section of the population and still have the vote.
Economic and social analysts commonly thrust apprehension on our society at the prospect of a steadily increasing proportion of the elderly, claiming the burden of providing for them will fall upon a shrinking number of the young and middle aged. If more of these policy advisers raised their heads from the statistics and looked around, they would see an increasing number of fit, agile, hardworking septuagenarians and octogenarians, not only able to care very well for themselves but also to add greatly to the national social and economic wellbeing.
We are not all slumping into slothful retirement, as seems so commonly assumed. Alive and well at seventy and eighty, most of us will continue to be economically productive and perhaps able to complement the rashness of youth with the calm of experience. Advances in medical research and in gerontology may well be paid for by the social and economic input from the elderly once society sees the obvious advantage of using this invaluable resource more fully. And it is worth repeating that the elderly will retain the vote and will have an increasing say on the government policies that affect them.
Return to Sender Elizabeth McRaeMy ten-year-old granddaughter is looking at my wedding photos. ‘Is that you, Nanny?’ she says. ‘Gosh.’
There are sixty-one years between us but there is no difference in the degree of our astonishment. Then I catch sight of an old girl looking at me from the mirror. It can’t be me. But I’m the only old girl in the house. I live here with my old man. We’ve just passed our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Here’s a photo of the two of us on a Lambretta scooter. It’s 1959. We look like children. I’m clinging delightedly to his reliable back. How can I now be thinking of his eightieth birthday?
These days we can expect to live through our seventies, eighties and even nineties with reasonably good health. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. Perhaps we develop a tolerance to the aches and pains of worn-out joints and failing senses. We expect certain physical difficulties. We exchange symptoms with our cronies. We know that parts can be replaced. I’m exercising my new knee joint so that my body will accept the foreign part and I’ll be the new woman the surgeon so confidently predicts. There’s a lot of pain in the process so I’ll not be looking for more bionic replacements if I can help it.
The Septuagenarian Dance Hamish KeithWhat fascinates me about recollection is how absent in it is chronology. In fact, much of its richness and value lies in the out-of-time collision of events. I think anyone who has written autobiography or memoir struggles with that to begin with and then relaxes into the exciting randomness of it all. How little of our lives we actually live in the now. How much more we live in the recalling of it and, to be honest, in the subtle and continuing massaging of it into a more coherent shape. That, I suppose, is the difference between being in or out of control of ourselves. We are in charge of how we feel and how we choose to remember how we felt. Which sounds like a recipe for denial, but is no more so than endless wine and chocolate could be mistaken for a balanced diet by someone who loved food. Loving life is loving all of it.
Swimming Against the Tide Bob Harvey
New Zealanders don’t always find one place that changes their life. Karekare changed mine. It has been there for all my seasons. I’ve christened my kids in its surf. I’ve slept on the sand, recovering from disappointment and disillusionment. I’ve made love in the dunes and babies in the baches. There I grew from a teenager into, I think, a good man. I am now aged somewhere between sixty and death. One is surely closer than the other.
I can measure my life by the Karekare calendar. As a fifteen-year-old I biked westward over the Waitakere Ranges. From the dusty, metalled West Coast Road I saw its black sands shimmering and, beyond, the Manukau Bar sweeping out into the Tasman Sea.
The vista overwhelmed me. I pedalled down the hill, brakes heating as I slid on the gravel. Under the pohutukawa by the car park, the surf club was in the middle of a three-day carnival to celebrate their twenty-first year. Kegs of DB cooled in the stream — it’s said they drank 100 gallons. The smell of cooking sausages and mussels filled the air. Everyone seemed to have a girl on their arm or on a blanket.
I saw where I was meant to be. I never wanted to leave. I joined up that day.
Although I was born one week after Pearl Harbor, I was born lucky. I was too young to have to fight and no other war of such scale has occurred. Nor has New Zealand ever again had to conscript young men for military service (my birthday was not even drawn in the ballot that singled out some of my contemporaries for compulsory training). Most of my teachers had fought in either World War I or II, and in one case both, so we assumed that we would also have to fight in a third world war. But it was not to be. By my twenty-first birthday that was a great relief.
By the time I was twenty-five, I knew I’d been lucky for three further reasons.
First, by the age of two, my world was as safe as any child’s world could be, protected by the vast might of the United States and the British Empire, as most people I knew still called it.
Second, antibiotics were now available and were freely given to rout any bacterial infection that put in an appearance. This, and the inoculations for diseases such as smallpox, then later polio, virtually guaranteed that I’d survive infancy, childhood and adolescence.
And third, I was born into one of the world’s most prosperous societies at the start of one of the world’s longest economic booms. I benefited not only from free health services but also a free education, opportunities to study abroad without winning a Rhodes, and full and rapidly diversifying employment. Until university, I confess I enjoyed only sport, plus dancing and wooing (as pashing was then often known); all three have steadily declined in importance across the years.
Much later, I realised that I was even luckier. Being ‘British’ — which was one of our possible identities — also meant that I had inherited immunity to an extraordinary range of diseases, for the seafaring British had helped create the world’s first global disease pools. My ancestors had paid for my immunity. And, as I now realise, I inherited the English language, and so a world in which I could move with great freedom and confidence, familiar with its language, institutions, laws and culture.
I had lunch recently with an old friend and colleague whom I see maybe once a year. We were having our usual exchange about books we were enjoying. We were both excited to have just discovered C.J. Sansom, and were in the process of recommending him to each other, when the subject of the Kindle arose, one of my students having been extolling its virtues in class that day. What did we think of this?
‘No,’ said my friend, ‘absolutely not.’ (This is someone who always has the latest in iPods or whatever.)
But, perhaps, we are just being older and nostalgic for form when substance is important. So, what is there about books that the Kindle might not be? Apart from furnishing a room, books also furnish a life. They mark our friendships. ‘What are you reading?’ my dearest friend always asks in our regular phone conversations. Our reading is part of our long history together, part of the fabric and connecting of our lives.
And they mark our travels. One of the great pleasures of growing older is rereading a book and remembering where you read it before: Monkey on a ship from England; Our Mutual Friend on a commuting train from Oxford to London; reading the Narnia books to my two small sons in the heat of a Lake Hawea summer; on a beach in Tunisia, with camels watching, my daughter reading The Life of Pi in one sitting. My son and I are planning to make the Trans-Siberian Railway crossing next year. A big part of the planning will be deciding what books we should take. To be honest, much of this memory of substance and place the Kindle could probably evoke, but not if you have kept the book.
List of contributors in the order they appear in the book:
Elizabeth McRae
Elizabeth Smither
Hamish Keith
Bob Harvey
Michael Corballis
Fleur Adcock
Brian Edwards
Marti Friedlander
Mervyn Cull
Elric Hooper
T.L. Rodney Wilson
Gordon McLauchlan
Erik Olssen
Fiona Kidman
John Coley
Marilyn Duckworth
Rodney Walshe
Robin Charteris
Bernard Brown
Ranginui Walker
Kate Harcourt
Marcia Russell
Max Cryer
Bruce Slane
Tessa Duder
Rhys Jones
Wilson Whineray
Pat Harrison
Barry Brickell
Merwyn Norrish
Margaret Bedggood
Raymond Columbus
Footnote:
An additional useful feature of the book are the brief biographies of each contributor.
The authors have generously signed over their royalty payments to Starship Hospital. Bravo.
Declaration of interest - The editor of Loving All of It is married to my sister.
