Tony Deyal | Next time tomorrow

I will reach my 80th year tomorrow (August 10). As I said in a previous article, last week really, you can live without sex, but now your glasses. You and your teeth don’t sleep together (and as you get older, your wife as well). I used to have ears that were hairier than head, but mine are as bare and at this age, as I told my wife, I don’t care even if the American dancer and singer Fred “As-taire.”

After all, he married a 37-year-old jockey. Worse, this is not so much a wise word as a wise crack without tack. Here are some more- Happy hour is a nap in the afternoon, just after you eat.; You have all the time in the world to put you snapshots in photo albums, but you have not idea who the people in the photos are.; Your children are beginning to look middle-age.; You keep more food that beer in the fridge; and worst of all you’re asleep, but others worry that you’re dead like a doornail.

I was told that the key to successful ageing is to pay as little attention to it as possible. In other words, turn a blind eye! In my case, I am one day from 80 and still very young at heart. However, there is a lot, a really huge lot, older like heck in other places. For example, one 80-year-old writer told me, “Tony, when you get to my age, life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.” Then being able to go when and where you want to go or what I call, me, the car and my eyes, especially since my two eyes are not linked with each other. I bought a car about two years ago because I thought it will not wear out on my. However, as happened to me, I forget where I put the car-keys. That, I thought, was normal. However, if I ever don’t know what to do with them when I find them, that’s the end for me and driving. In other words, what Caribbean people consider as a car, car hole.

MAJOR CONCERN

The other major concern is dealing with the honey and sometimes, the horny, moon. It is like the joke about the lady who told her husband, “Let’s go upstairs and make love.” Almost in tears he replied, “Darling, I can’t do both.” In my case I get symptoms in the places where I used to get urges. In fact, I have two glasses in my car because one helps me to locate the other one which sometimes is on my head and I don’t know or remember. It is like taking what happened to me when I went to a big department store and I couldn’t find the car in the parking lot. I called the police thing somebody had stolen it. Hearing the noise my friend came out of the store and asked, “What happen? Your car? But you came with me in mine!”

Fortunately for me, I stay far from the ladies even though my wife sometimes not sure. So I joked, “Well you know when I was in the government dinner and there was this young lady wearing a very low-cut, of the shoulder dress. I kept on staring at the lady for a while and then asked her, “My dear, what is keeping the dress on you?” She looked at me and laughed, “Only your age, Mr. Tony.” All of us with female children in the twenties, have to worry. As one lady who liked gossip to share with others, asked a young neighbour, “Why did you marry your husband?” The young lady replied, “It was the old story of opposite attracting each other. I was pregnant and he wasn’t.” There was a husband and wife who drove for miles in silence after a terrible argument in which neither would budge. The husband pointed to a mule in a pasture, “Relative of yours?” he asked. She replied, “Yes. By marriage.” This is a great example of marriage being nature’s way of keeping people from fighting with strangers.

In thinking about tomorrow and my 80th birthday, I don’t know or remember my birth but later, in school, I found out that Jesus was visited in a manger. I was glad that there was a lady known as a “doula” to help my mom, and no animals and men with things that I couldn’t eat. Last year, at 79, I read that Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father of the United states, invented the “bifocal eyeglasses”. Unfortunately, far too late for me. Moses, the Hebrew prophet, encountered the the burning bush. Me and my friends did that light years before him. We almost burn a house and all. The people who were 80 years old included Queen Victoria of England, used to make it clear, “We are not amused.” I laugh and make jokes too much for that. Robert Pen Warren, the first ever US poet laureate, said, “The end of man is knowledge but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him.”

DON’T CARE TOO MUCH

Being over the hill, I don’t really care too much. My computer has more memory that me and from what I know, a bachelor asked the computer to find him the perfect mate. He wanted someone who was small and cute, loved water sports, and enjoyed group activities. The computer responded quickly, “Marry a penguin.” I read more and remember less (if any at all). I have friends whose wives and children discuss their husbands and fathers as though they’re not in the room. In my case, I most likely wont hear them. And fortunately for having a son working in the US, my wife can say about my retirement at 80, “Twice a much husband on half as much pay or less.”

It also leaves me to reach out the only newspaper that still uses my weekly Saturday column for more than 32 years, the Barbados Nation, as well as many others who ask and get my articles in many places, not just in the Caribbean but also in Canada (where I have a fan-club) and parts of the US and even the UK supporters.

While I thank them all, I will continue to try to get the country in which I was born and the Caribbean that I consider my real home, to get the governments and people to make sure that every creed and race find an equal place in their country and the entire region. As a person, I have for a very, very long time helped others to help themselves and one-another. But most of all, I have tried and wish my children to follow my commitment to be true to Cod and tray as hard as possible to stick to the truth, regardless.

Tony Deyal says he knows his knees buckle but not his belt but his broad mind and narrow waist will never ever change places. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com