You
may have read this piece before, but bear with me. I published
it a few years ago but, I’m 84th this month, and somehow that makes it even
more poignant.
I’m an
average-looking old guy of medium height, with all my own hair and pretty well all
my teeth. You wouldn’t look at me twice at me in the street, and if you needed
to ask a passer-by for directions, you surely wouldn’t pick me. No, you’d pick
someone who looked more approachable and genial, or more user-friendly, as they
say these days.
It’s
not that I look menacing or anything. It’s just that, with my face in repose,
advancing age – okay, let’s be honest, advanced
age -- has given me a decidedly stern and somber look. In fact, you might take
me for a curmudgeon. My mouth turns down and, with the lines on my face, you
might reasonably suppose me to be bad-tempered and humorless, even sour.
Of
course, the exact opposite is true, I’m kind to babies and small children, I
brake for squirrels, and feel guilty when I have to kill even a moth or an ant.
I certainly wouldn’t harm a mouse or a muskrat, so you might well say I’m a
have-a-heart kind of person. And when it comes to humor I can be almost funny
on occasions. Well, at least amusing.
They
say that growing old’s not for sissies. They’re right. This gruff exterior
makes me sad and wistful. I know you only have my word for it but once, as a
soldier, a bridegroom, a soccer dad, and even on the first rungs up the
corporate ladder (something by which we foolishly tend to measure success and
failure) I was – I blush to say this – pretty good looking. What happened to
that dashing young captain who sits in a silver photo-frame on my wife’s
writing desk?
Time
happened, that’s what. Okay, we all change with age, but in varying degrees. A
lot of friends who are older than I (yes, there are still some) have nice, open
faces and pleasant smiles. So why don’t I?
My
wonderful wife, Lynn, normally a paragon of kindness, jokes about my glum
appearance. She laughs aloud at the pictures in my passport and driver’s
license.
“Why
didn’t you smile?” she says. “I was
smiling,” I tell her.
I
really was. Inside me, I could feel that cheery upturned mouth and the warm
twinkle in the eye but, somehow, when the pictures came out, all that was
missing was a prison uniform, or a string of numbers hanging on a board around
my neck.
My late mother-in-law,
a lovely old lady with a Giaconda smile and handsome dark eyes, was a fountain
of wise saws and sayings. One of these was that the living’s on the inside. By that she meant that many plain
pug-ugly or unprepossessing people, and inanimate things, too, are often
beautiful on the inside. She applied this especially to homes in mean, run-down
streets, and to homely people, but the message was clear: never take anything
at face value; instead, search for the beauty within.
She was right, wasn’t she? All the same, we
still go on making judgments based on external appearances. More than in most
countries, we Americans put an impossibly high premium on good looks. Not so
elsewhere. In my native Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, many relatively plain
men and women have made it right to the top on stage and screen. They wouldn’t
even have landed a walk-on part on Broadway, or in Hollywood.
Don’t laugh, but behind my
fossil-like façade I still believe that, physically and mentally, I’m that
young man in the silver picture frame. My wife and I published a novel a few years ago, a thriller
set in exotic South East Asia. Mark Gregson, the hero (they call heroes protagonists these days), is a young
ex-Army officer. In my head and heart I’m still thirty-two year old Gregson,
chasing heroin traffickers through the jungle; racing up three hundred steps in
pursuit of thugs; saving his lovely girlfriend from drowning and, in the nick
of time, disarming a booby trap under the hood of his hired car. The flesh may
well be a little weaker, but the spirit’s still willing and, yes, the living
really is on the inside.
King
Duncan, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth knew
just what he was on about when he said: “There’s no art to find the mind’s
construction in the face.”
So if you’re in your
thirties, or even much older than that, kindly remember this when you pass some
old geezer in the street.
Go on, smile
at him, it might be me.
oo0oo
