Tony Deyal Column...The Number is 63

Tony Deyal Column…The Number is 63

Aug 04, 2008 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

I always wondered about 69 and what I would be like if I ever attained that number of three score and nine. I suppose if you have to score three times and then another 9, what’s good for sixty million Frenchmen should satisfy, if not satiate.

I have another six to go before I reach there, enough time to learn the language, perhaps: cherchez la femme and Irma la Douce and all that. I am now going on 63, and I wonder what my face will be like six years from now. I know what my head is like. It is balding, and the fallout is worse than what is happening now in the media frenzy about Madonna and the baseball player.

When you’re a material girl and you meet someone with a name like A-Rod, you can’t behave like a virgin. I tell people that just because there is a hole in the roof, it doesn’t mean that the fire inside has been extinguished.

I know what my waistline is like. I have to rent space in my neighbour’s yard to extend our clothesline when I hang up my pants to dry. But my narrow hips and broad mind have not yet changed places, and while there are gaps in my wide smile, it is still warm and sometimes shy.

At 63, you think that even though the candles cost more than the cake, the game might not be worth the candle. The phrase came from the old pre-electricity days when you played cards and dice by candlelight. If the pickings were poor, the game was not worth the candle.

In looking at the biggest game of all, life, I figure that at 63 a certain ennui creeps in, a sense of déjà nous, that causes you to view your life in a rear view mirror and wonder what the hell you are doing here going through hell and high water to rush the brush, fight the feeling and dance to the beat of fortune’s finger playing what stops she pleases.

Not me, no siree! I rush out of sleep and out of bed each morning with a sense of expectancy, of deeds to do, mountains to climb, dragons to slay, damsels in distress to rescue (if my fiercely protective wife would let me) and a welter of thoughts, ideas and insights to organize into wisdom.

In the version of information theory to which I subscribe, data is the raw material of enlightenment coming at you from all angles, all disciplines, chaotic in a sense, but fitting in somehow with things you already know. You shift and shape the data, order it around like Naomi Campbell with her maid, beat and stamp on it like grapes to wine, and out comes information – patterned and orderly.

Only when you apply it, when you do something to it, when you use it, does information become wisdom.
In spite of failing eyesight, I still read; and even though my job restricts my spare time reading, I continue to be as voracious as I am catholic in my appetite for the printed page. My wife does not hold against me the fact that there are nights I go to bed with Donna Leon or Elizabeth George. There are Rankin nights and Colin Dexter nights, and occasionally a reread of Tolkein or Frank Herbert.

Herbert has a special meaning for me. Maybe it is my Gurkha ancestry, my genetic link to the fiercest fighters in the world; and my ability, which did not come naturally, to see in the worst crisis a zone of opportunity.

In the middle of the Gaza Strip that sometimes threatens to overtake my mind, a flower grows and grows and grows until the desert departs, biding its time waiting for a dog night of the soul. In Dune, Herbert recognizes that we all have fears and there are things we all dread.

In the classic by Orwell, there are rats, some of whom I continue to encounter in my own life and work.
What Herbert says is, “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

So my last will and testament will not take place yet, unless the Lord wills it; and even then I will not go gentle into that good night. Dylan Thomas said it, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Where there’s a will, there’s a way; but while I will write my will (and should), I will not let others exert their will on me if I don’t want to, or if it involves my integrity or my sense of self.

The testament is another thing altogether. The will business is one thing, but given the heritage and nomenclature of the others – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — the gospel according to Sookdeo (my Hindi name) might not go down too well with the orthodox, something which I am not and never will be.

The gospel according to Anthony, some kind of testament newer than new, while better than an eye for an eye or tooth for a tooth (something I would like to have) is my personal credo moulded out of my personal circumstances, my life and times.

I do not carry emotional baggage. I do not bear people in mind. I go forward confidently, secure in who I am. There was a time I used to say, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a gun in the valley.” I have met meaner, nastier and uglier.

I want to be able to face my wife and children, and I want them to feel pride in me for who I am, and pride in themselves as people who will prefer to die on their feet than live on their knees.

As the blast of war blows in our ears, as we stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood, it is not John Paul Jones, although we have not yet begun to fight, but it is a West Indian war cry, “The war now start.”

*Tony Deyal was last seen asking what happened to the sixty million Frenchwomen. What do they do for recreation?