CAP, CAKE AND CANDLE

Aug 17, 2009 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

On my twelfth birthday, my parents tried to surprise me with an air rifle, but they missed. This year, fifty-two years later, my family gave up on the ties, watches and fishing equipment (they let me off the hook) and bought me a cap like the one favoured by the late, great ruler of China.

It is, by and large, especially large, a singularly splendid headpiece which prompted me to inquire petulantly, “Only one?” meaning that I would have welcomed others on the basis that the Mao the merrier.

We were all surprised that a cap or other headgear could be too large for me. However, we surmised that the past year had taken such a tremendous and traumatic toll on my ego that it manifested itself physiologically instead of psychologically. Where other people are so traumatised that they go to see a shrink, I actually achieved one.

I have always felt like the boy whose schoolmates taunted him about the size of his head, “Big Head” something or the other being the least of the epithets hurled at him. One day, facing more taunts than usual, and considerably upset and downcast, he complained to his mother who reassured him that he should not let the envy of his classmates get him down, that his head was not large when compared with other people and that he really had a nice and handsome head.

The boy’s mother then cajoled him into going to the supermarket for her. She needed ten pounds of potatoes really badly, and a pound of onions, as well as about three pounds of green bananas to make some soup, would he be a dear and fetch it for her? Still upset, he asked his mother for a bag to bring home the groceries. “A bag?” she asked. “You don’t need a bag. Use your cap!”

But I am getting a-head of myself. Where I lived in my youth, life was so tough that the only thing most of my friends got for their birthdays was a year older. Now I cling to life the way I would cling to a comb were that among my birthday gifts. Bald as I am, I will never part with it. I have realised that growing old is inevitable, growing up is optional and it is one option I will not exercise too readily. I continue to nurture what the psychologists call “the child in me”.

In other words, I will be forever Jung. While, unlike the late Michael Jackson, I will not worship on the altar of Peter Pan, I don’t mind trying to be like Panhandle Pete. According to “answers.com”, Pete was a one-man band, who used, “dozens of instruments which were fastened to his body with all manner of straps, ropes, and rubber bands.

These included not only the expected banjo and guitar and obligatory neck-strap harmonica, but a whole series of whistles, bells, crash cymbals, horns, and so forth. By the end of his career he had a total of some 32 different sound-making apparatus hooked up and ready to be blown, honked, or banged when the appropriate moment would come.”

Even if you don’t know who I am, you would at least be aware of my approach and conscious of my versatility.

As life evolves, I suppose we all have the option of being like Caesar’s wife – all things to all men- or like Horatio in Hamlet, a person admired by his Prince because, “for thou hast been/ As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing;/ A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards/ Has ta’en with equal thanks.” My goal has been to be one of those very rare people “Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled/ That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger/ To sound what stop she please.” In fact, I try every day to be “that man/ That is not passion’s slave.” In other words, it is not about age, it is about attitude. Caution is not the only thing you should exercise, although that might be useful.

There was a man my age who spent the days before his birthday deliberately steering his wife from one foreign car dealership to another. So when she asked, “What do you want for your birthday this year dear?” he replied, “Something that goes from 0 to 200 in 4 seconds or less.” She told the Judge in the divorce court that she had got him exactly what he asked for – a scale.

In my case, time is not the only thing that weighs heavily upon me. There is the constant need to exercise to the worrying refrain, “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may diet”. Fortunately, I am still aware of my preferences and so there is no worry that I would eat, drink and be Mary either today or tomorrow.

My colleague Bertrand sent me a snide little birthday note on Skype, “69 soon eh?…tables are turning then.” I had to tell him that in terms of my lexicological and mathematical education, 69 came long before 64. What I am in fact looking forward to is 71 or 69 with two random integers making up the prime numbers. There is no genuine comeback to this except to back up and make a complete turnaround- a reversal of fortune so to speak.

Now the glint in my eyes comes from my progressive lenses. People advise me that when you get to my place on the hill, with the crest behind me, I should not buy green bananas unless I leave them in my will. I jokingly say that when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is lie in bed and read the newspaper obituaries. If my name is not in there, I get up.

This year, like all previous years, I got up to love, kisses and many displays of affection from my family, and phone calls from those unable to share the presence and presents. Birthdays are good for me. Statistics show that people who have the most birthdays live the longest. While I have never been blessed with the ability of many of my contemporaries to have their cake and eat it, or to even have my Kate and Edith, I can wax warmly and forever on the fact that the cakes have always been worth the candles. More than anything else, my cap runneth over and I intend to continue living life to the brim or, as we say in China, Mao times.

*Tony Deyal was last seen passing on two bits of advice, “Birthdays are nature’s way of telling us to eat more cake” and “You were born an original. Don’t die a copy.”