Musings on a 47-year journey while losing my hair

Mar 05, 2017 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols

I was 17 when I first listened to the lyrics of the Beatles quaint and light-hearted ‘When I’m sixty-four’.

It was a strange, fanciful tune, and I smiled at its futuristic musing. The melody had a kind of nursery rhyme lilt which made it sound almost frivolous. That was in 1970, our Republic year, and there were few qualms about what changes would be wrought in body and mind forty-seven years into a hazy future. Would I or our planet even still exist? Now I know.
Back then I had a lot of friends, talkative, idealistic; and occasionally slightly militant. They included my St. Lucian-born British buddy Philip, a year younger than me and his sister Lorna, one year my senior, who my heart claimed as my first real girlfriend. There were others too – a group of guys who hung out at the corner of South Road and Albert Streets. We listened to The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, The Drifters, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, and other sixties-seventies singers, dreaming of how we would change the world. For teenagers, sixty-four is a galaxy away.
My two English friends were responsible for my appreciation of Beatles songs at a time when Black soul music was the ‘in’ thing, and I took both in stride. Across the road from where Philip and Lorna lived with their father on Main Street was ‘Feraz’ parlour, where I often went for my regular fare of peanut punch and puri, along with punching records on an old-fashioned juke-box.
The latter became a source of consolation after my first teenage heartbreak as Engelbert Humperdinck pleaded on my behalf; “Am I that easy to forget?” But strangely enough, it was the song that peered whimsically four decades into the future which haunted me as the years rolled on.
Four mop-haired youngsters from Liverpool, England sang Paul McCartney’s lyrics, “When I get older losing my hair/Many years from now/Will you be sending me a valentine/Birthday greetings, a bottle of wine? If I’d been out till quarter to three /Would you lock the door? Will you still need me, will you still feed me/When I’m sixty-four?”
They were directed, I presume, at a young wife or partner; the almost childish nature of the questions betraying the fear of loneliness and rejection in old age.
The words faded over time, brightening every now and then only to mock my adult years, and as middle age loomed, taking on a more somber undertone. Now with the senior citizen years advancing, and having just hit McCartney’s apparently random choice of age, resignation and hope battle near the top of a mental and emotional heap of past, present, and future exploits.
Time is running out and my bucket list is far from exhausted, but staying relatively healthy and hopeful at my age in a country like ours is an achievement not to be undervalued. Some of my friends didn’t stick around for such introspection and based on the things we all talked about as young men, I’m sure they would have wanted to.
In the early 1970s we sang the new republic, even as we became increasingly wary of politics and sympathetic to the plight of the small man – the underdogs of a society in the clutch of a few assertive alpha males, trailed by a multitude of rice-eaters.
‘We’ was a group of idealistic youngsters influenced by a couple of older and wiser heads that included men of the calibre of Alfred Skeete and Brian Rodway, and Dr. Josh Ramsammy who occasionally visited Skeete, then my next door neighbour. These stalwarts have passed on, and so too have at least three of the younger group. Another is bed-ridden in an American sanatorium.
Dozens of people whom I have called ‘friend’ over the years, as well as schoolmates and work colleagues, have passed away too. From early childhood days through high school and higher education, and on to teaching, journalism, and national insurance, they fell, to illness and accident. During that period, death also claimed my grandmother, parents, three sisters, a son, and a nephew. Several children I taught in school didn’t make it to adulthood. Even my recreational Scrabble pals; four of them have died since the last major competition in which I took part in 2006.
It’s 2017 now, and the ‘grand’ years are upon me and my wife of four decades; my sixth grandchild is on the way. Like the Beatles ‘predicted’ I am losing my hair but still trying with varying degrees of success to protect the remaining black from the betraying an ever-encroaching grey, with the occasional touch up from ‘Just for Men’.
I look back upon my Afro days and wince. Valentine and birthday greetings aren’t what they used to be, and I stopped hard-drinking twenty years ago. I don’t have to worry about anyone locking the door on me; nocturnal banditry and drunk driving usually keep me indoors after 10 p.m.
As I alluded to earlier, growing old in Guyana is not something to necessarily look forward to, maybe unless you have the financial means to cater for health and geriatric care and family members still around to offer a modicum of solace and companionship. But wait, sixty-four is still relatively young, and even in this country with all its head-scratching, hair-greying stress, there are men and women in their sixties, seventies, and beyond, still very active in numerous areas of activity. Times are changing too. My parents didn’t make it to biblical three-score-and ten but two of my sisters have, and I am now the youngest of four remaining siblings.
I still long to set these gradually-dimming eyes on Kaieteur Falls and Rupununi sunsets. Peru’s Machu Picchu, China’s Great Wall, Africa’s Serengeti, and a round of sky-diving may however remain as dreams, fading slowly into senile improbability. But who knows; my heart and spirit are years younger than my physical body, and once I get over this lower back pain that has hobbled me for almost a week now, I’m still able to walk a couple of miles without panting for breath or buckling from tiredness. Now for those other excursions all I need is a good chunk of money, and time.
They say you can’t go back, or maybe you shouldn’t even if you could. Youth’s memories are often seen through the proverbial rose-tinted glasses; the reality usually being less idyllic. To tell the truth though, I would if it were possible, but only if I could put to use the wisdom I would have gained from experience and experiment; well, so much for that!
I’ve lost contact with most of the friends of my youth who may still be alive, but I’m making new ones, including young children and some older folks well past my age.
A few weeks ago I attended an impromptu birthday party for one of them in Bush Lot on the Essequibo Coast. She turned 95 just four days before my birthday on February 16th. Her faculties and wit are amazingly sharp and she still travels to and from the United States … by herself. She’d reached 64 thirty-one years ago!
And why did Paul McCartney choose that particular number to muse on? It’s anyone’s guess. Maybe it had something to do with numerology’s suggestion that as the product of 8-squared, it is ‘the expression of a realized totality and perfect’ yet it is also ‘the symbol of paramount chaos’ whatever those terms mean.
Anyway, for those of you yet to hit 64; when you do, take a deep, reflective breath, listen to that Beatles ditty, and just get on with living!

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