We're older than we should be

Went to dinner the other Friday night with old friends.  Two old friends and their respective marriage partners.  

The Young Nethertons

The 3 originals - moi, Linda (in middle), Dene (back right)
David (at back left) married to Linda & Nicki (the 'young' one in front right) married to Dene

I refer to 'old' as in terms of the length of our friendship as it is a friendship that began many decades ago.  Because of the length of the friendship I guess one has to be honest and admit that due to the number of annual celebrations each has had it means that they too are personally 'old'.

The resultant outcome meaning, I too must be 'old'.

That boring, rote phrase comes to mind, 'But we don't feel old'.  We don't.  And we're not.  I doubt you would get any of the three, or their partners, to openly consider themselves 'old'.

It's a different time nowadays - where age is meaningless, our age is ageless.

Reflecting back on our own parents in our childhoods am sure we all would agree that they were indeed, very old.  They did old things.  Like gardening, knitting, baking, sitting in the lounge chair reading a book.  Yes, our dads still went to work and our mums cleaned house all day, that was the norm for any parents in our neighbourhood in that era.  But our parents and the neighbouring parents were all old.  They dressed old, the things they didn't do, or did do, their seemingly mundane everyday living meant they were 'old'.

For those of us gathered at the restaurant table on Friday night there could be no comparison between the parents of our childhood times and ourselves; us parents of grown up children, us whose children now have their own children.  We're not old.  We are that Peter Pan generation that is unique, the never to be repeated again generation.

One of our group has just recently given up playing regular golf and has turned her attention more to her hobbies of serious artistic painting and regular yoga, and in summer is swimming in the local estuary waters at her seaside home. 

The other in the group is still working full time, enjoying his relatively new interest of riding his bike around the suburban cycle ways of Auckland, walks the dog and enjoys his passion for photography and wandering the aisles of the Mega Mitre 10s or the like.

And me, myself, still miraculously managing to churn out a run most mornings, be they at now ridiculously slow rates of knots per kilometre and shortened to thirty or forty minute stints.  I'm still enjoying lifting weights at a gym, be it at spasmodic  intervals, tramping on Mondays with new found tramping friends, sometimes dust cobwebs off an old bike and pedal it somewhere, maybe attend a weekly indoor spin classes, ducking (literally) into the local swimming pool to churn out a kilometre of freestyle, travel constantly from one place to another to keep up social and personal commitments and seem to have an inability to sit still when at home as somehow march out over 20,000 steps in a day just by 'doing things'.

Would our parents, the parents of the 50's and 60's ever have considered downward dogs or tree poses as a pastime, or rpms, or leg presses, or dumb bell curls and strokes per minute or sculling as anything comprehensible they would do?   Mind you, there probably were no yoga classes, no gyms or weights in those days - but who's splitting hairs?

What I am saying is that aging now, for us, is not aging as it was for our parents.  Old for them was once they hit 40 and they honestly considered when their 50th birthdays came they were senior citizen material.  My father retired at 57.

Thus, back to my first paragraph - went to dinner with old friends the other night, three of us who grew up in a street named Netherton Street, in Auckland; three of us who enjoyed the blissful childhood years of the 1950's and 1960's.

 

Come mid teenage hood our lives separated and went their various ways; careers, marriages, children, broken marriages, broken and restarted careers - but many decades later, through osmosis, we re-met, reignited our friendship and have maintained contact ever since.

It is rather nice.  Yes, very nostalgic but also very uncommon for three individuals to have maintained a childhood bond for so many decades.  And best of all we haven't aged one bit.

When we do get together we do not spend our time in nostalgia, reflecting on those childhood years - indeed, over the dinner table there was banter and serious conversations about New Zealand's recent politics, the USA's ridiculous politics, today's dietary fads, the holidays had and holidays planned, best dining places and exquisite new foods and general light hearted conversations which would have been similar to the conversations of those at the tables around us.

But  ... every now and then some little gem would pop into the conversation, something to remind us of how glorious our childhood was.  We all acknowledge, we grew up in an era of blissful ignorance, blissful years of not worrying about anything except what was the next game we would play, blissfully long summers and not so blissful punishments our parents may have given out when we did something wrong.

Well, maybe that was just me, seems we all remember it was my parents who had the greatest belief in not sparing the rod and spoiling the child.

I have never been the best at memory recall, no matter how near or far back they are - my brain is one of the floppy disc variety;  it is small, there is only so much it can store, once it has reached capacity the earlier memories seem to fall off the other end - retaining and regaining great amounts of recall from storage is often seen with a blank stare.  Indeed, I have often said that all my memory storage has gone to the Cloud and I've lost the passwords to retrieve it back from there.  So whenever I am in the company of others from any of my past I eagerly rely on their memory recall to kindle my ability to slowly pull out the initial vagueness of the stories and on many occasions their instigation has the era and story flooding back in bulk download.  There is never a happier moment than when that occurs.

Linda, the other female of the trio, reminded me of the times our cycling adventures took us away from Netherton Street for almost entire days and saw us cycle as far as Point Chevalier beach or way over the other side of Mount Albert or Kingsland.  In those days it seemed like fifteen or twenty miles - in reality is was far, far less, but to our small eyes it seemed like the end of our world's existence.   We would have been ten years old.  Maybe less, maybe more.

I never owned a bike so used to use my brother's black one and ride it with one leg through the cross bars.  Unimaginable how I managed that, for so many miles.  The flexibility of kids is gobsmakingly impressive. 

Winters had their own fun.  Our street was on the side of a hill and from our homes on wet winter days we would see the Oakley Creek at the bottom of the hill slowly become a flooded torrent of waters, so we would rush to each other's homes and trot our way down to the flooded fields and walk knee high through the stream of rising waters until we thought it was probably about time our parents would be calling us in for dinner.

That same creek runs at about a six inch level nowadays and never floods due to storm water drainage having been constructed over the past decades.  Today's parents would freak out should their children be found paddling through that six inches.  Ours did not freak out.  We were not supposed to go down there but the parents knew we did.  I'd return home, knowing I'd probably get a hiding, but at the time that didn't matter, play and fun was the only things that mattered, consequences were merely the inevitable.

Two of us played tennis and each Saturday morning for many years Dene and I would set off from our home and walk to our tennis club in Blockhouse Bay.  It was probably only about three kilometres, but at 9, 10 or 12 years of age it seemed like scores of miles.  Our parents waved us goodbye as we set off about 8 in the morning to walk those kilometres to be there by 9 a.m. for a morning of organised tennis games then once tennis was finished we would walk those kilometres home.

Can't imagine any parent letting their child walk through the streets of Auckland for three kilometres now, and then to not know exactly what time they would be home, but know they would get there eventually.

If we did not get home until early afternoon, our parents would presume we must have dawdled our way back.  There was never any search party sent out or fretting parent freaking out because we were ten minutes late.  I presumed they breathed a sigh of relief for every minute we were not there!

We played tennis on the street after school and in the weekends, sometimes a car would come along, but not very often, so the games could be quite long.

We played until dark, or until we heard our mothers yell from our houses to come home for dinner.  As soon as dinner was over we would be back out playing again.

We were just little kids when Linda and I, and very often her younger siblings with us, would walk down Richardson Road to our local shops to pick up the tobacco packets, or Zig Zag papers for our mums or dads to roll their cigarettes.  Or in Linda's case, to pick up the weekly edition of The Truth that her parents had preordered from the local bookshop.  There was no home mail delivery of those papers or magazines in those days.  We would peruse that naughty paper and see what naughty pictures were in it. Those were the days of the Man magazine.  Seen as almost pornographic then, silly nonsense in these present days.

I didn't care who I played with, so long as someone, anyone would or was allowed to come out and play.  Linda's family lived next door, there was her mum and dad and her four brothers and sisters, so it was unusual if there wasn't any one of them allowed out to play.

I can see now I must have been a pain in the proverbial for their mother every time she heard a knock on the door it would be me asking for someone to come and play. I knew that then, but didn't care as play was the overall riding factor in my purpose in life, there was nothing else to be considered.

And if Linda or the other siblings couldn't play, I would head across the road to Dene's house to see if he was allowed to.  Used to love it there, he had four brothers and a sister and his parents interacted with their kids really well.  Today we'd think it natural, in those days it was unusual.  I was always very fond of Dene's parents, as a child it was not usual for grown ups to be nice and relate to children, it was a case of being seen and not heard, they did and made me feel good.  Their home was a well loved home.

Dene wasn't allowed out to play quite so much, his father had him fulfill his chores of mowing lawns and washing cars before he was allowed to play.  I was always ever so grateful I was born a girl and only had to do the dishes, even that was a trial I would attempt to avoid if that could be done.  I never made my bed, my mother always did.  As soon as I woke on Saturdays it was up and dressed for tennis and during school holidays it was out of bed as soon as I thought the kids next door may be allowed out to play.

As much as she does not like my reminding her now, it was Linda who always told the rest of us kids what games we would play.  I like to now call it 'bossy', just to tease her.  The other night she tried to explain her 'bossyness' as merely being the organised one, directing.  It was Linda who dictated if we were to play hide and seek, or bullrush, or cowboys and Indians.  And yes, we did play that.  The Lone Ranger and Tonto were favoured characters at the Saturday matinees at the Mayfair Theatre in Sandringham, as well as our playtime heros.  Our favourite all time game was me being cast as the cowboy Clint McCaid and Linda was inevitably the frail cowgirl who needed rescuing by Clint.  Linda reminded me over dinner that I always faithfully managed to rescue her from whatever pending disaster the baddy cowboys or Indians had in store for her.

We did ponder the other night as to who or where the character Clint McCaid, or McCain, came from.  We have no idea.  It matters not, in our memories he was a hero, I was told I was to play the hero part and Linda was to be the fair maiden to be rescued. 

She was bossy.

So it was that our Friday evening repast was nearly over, the Thai food was enjoyably appreciated over the talk of world politics, child poverty, cruise holidays, pet cats, dogs and childhood joys. 

We had run out of food, wine and knew it was time to part, be it with some reluctance  as in some ways departing means we do not know when we would meet again, we now live towns and cities apart; but depart we had to with each of us openly admitting that we had some personal sense of needing to get home to our fluffy cat or ambivalent Labrador, our pets who we deemed need us more than we need them.  And, it was, after all, a late Friday night for us, it was already ten minutes past nine in the evening.

Err ...  Yes ...  I guess we are old.