ROUTE 66 AND ALL THAT

Aug 15, 2011 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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I hit Route 66 today on my road trip through life.  It has been a long journey starting on this date in 1945 at a little village in South Oropouche, Trinidad, and now here I am on what Nat King Cole called, “the highway that is best” and advised, “Get your kicks, on Route 66.”  Route 66 is also called “The Mother Road” and my mother was there, done that, and touching 81 now, having slowed down a bit what with the arthritis and heart issues.
Kicks there have been aplenty, and kisses too.  It is interesting that the other name for Route 66 is the “Will Rogers Highway.”  Rogers was the great American humourist and political satirist.  He is famous for one-liners like, “A fool and his money are soon elected”, “Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for things they don’t need”, “Anything important is never left to the vote of the people”, “We only get to vote on some man; we never get to vote on what he is to do”, “Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggie” until you can find a rock” and my personal motto, “Do the best you can, and don’t take life too serious.”
Along the way, I also learnt a very serious lesson and later found out that Rogers had been there before me, “Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.”  I found that even the Almighty cannot change the past.  Several autocratic regimes have tried to rewrite history and have failed.  The key is to learn from the past and move on – don’t carry baggage that weighs you down.  One of my newly-discovered thriller writers (already a favourite with me) Norwegian, Joe Neesbo, writing about the recent horror in his country, titled the piece, “The Past Is A Foreign Country.”
He said, “A few days ago, before the bombing here and the shootings on Utoya Island, a friend and I were talking about how the joy of being alive always seems to go hand in hand with the sorrow that things change. Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before — to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.
“There is no road back to the scent of the Julys when I was young and leapt from a boulder into the ice-cold meltwater of a Norwegian fjord… So if there is no road back to how things used to be, to the naïve fearlessness of what was untouched, there is a road forward. To be brave. To keep on as before. To turn the other cheek as we ask: ‘Is that all you’ve got?’ To refuse to let fear change the way we build our society.”
The other thing I’ve learnt is to enjoy my own company.  True, I love having my family around and the company, what little of it I now find, is great, but in the end people see me smiling to myself as I remember old jokes (of which I am one) or bits of poetry, or being stubbornly self-sufficient and warn me about cutting the half-acre of rain-fed grass that surrounds the house.
“Youh heart”, “Youh age”, “You blood pressure”, “Pay somebody” and I reply, “My finances don’t allow it but, even if it did, I am like Sinatra.  I do it my way.”
There are some other people who at 66 did it their way as well.  Michaelangelo completed his famous fresco, the Last Judgment, in the Sistine Chapel.  As one friend said, “Pity they didn’t have spray cans and rollers in those days otherwise he would have finished much earlier and would have been able to celebrate his birthday in style.”
The astronomer Annie Jump Cannon completed her catalogue or stars accounting for 400,000 celestial objects.  She didn’t have the time to record those that I see when I try to bend down or stand up too quickly.  Carrie Fuld co-founded the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and later Einstein went there and talked a lot about relativity.
He said, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour.  Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute.  That’s relativity.”  Using this explanation, I can say that I’ve had a relatively good life but not as good as Maurice Chevalier, the suave French actor.  One day while backstage with comedian, Phil Silvers, during a show some lovely young women passed and he sighed longingly, “Ah, if only I were twenty years older.”
Silvers asked, “Don’t you mean twenty years younger?”  “No, if I were twenty years older, “Chevalier replied, “these girls would not bother me the way they do.”
I think of Henry Cavendish who at my age calculated the gravitational constant making it possible to determine earth’s mass, Nikos Kazantzakis writing Zorba the Greek and Maggie Kuhn found the Gray Panthers.  My mass is growing and I avoid the scales.  I stick to my columns but keep on postponing writing “A Mystery In Port of Spain” which starts, “There are no mysteries in Port-of-Spain.  Everybody in Port-of-Spain and in the whole of Trinidad in fact, knows everything before it happens or so they say after the fact.
“As for Panthers, I don’t wear or use them, and have no intention to found or even find one.  What keeps me alive is wondering why the hairs on my chest are longer than those on my head. Einstein said, “Life is like riding a bicycle.  To keep your balance you must keep moving.”   I am no Lance Armstrong but I don’t need his skills to keep moving now that I’m over the hill.
*  Tony Deyal was last seen repeating what Will Rogers said about having the courage of your convictions, “You’ve got to go out on a limb sometimes because that’s where the fruit is”…and the fun.

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