I’m 88
this month, an average-looking old guy of medium height, with all my own hair
and pretty much all of my own teeth. You wouldn’t look at me twice if we met in
the street, and if you needed to ask a passer-by for directions, you surely
wouldn’t pick me. No, you’d choose someone who looks 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 smile at babies and small children, I
brake for squirrels, and feel guilty when I have to kill even a moth or an ant.
So you might well say I’m a have-a-heart kind of guy. 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, Lynn’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 around) have
nice, open faces and pleasant smiles. So why don’t I?
My
wonderful 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 come out, all that’s missing
is 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. Lynn 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 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, he might be me.
oo0oo
