On Turning Forty-One (five years ago)
I’m undergoing my forty-sixth birthday this week, so please allow me the indulgence of running the following ‘getting older’ piece, which appeared in ‘The Age Sunday Life’ five years ago. Obviously, certain things have changed since then, but I’ve left it unaltered, save for some appalling punctuation in the opening paragraph.
Paul McCartney is sixty-three years old. When he launched into ‘Sergeant Pepper’s’ at the beginning of Live-8, I entertained a brief hope that he’d give ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ one final outing…
When I get older, losing my hair,
Seven months from now.
Given that McCartney is still being described as ‘boyish’, and given that the bloke behind the counter at my post office is still calling me ‘Son’, you’d think that forty-one would be nothing to complain about. But here’s how I spent the evening of my forty-first birthday: watching The Last Waltz, on DVD, on my own. How sad is that? I’d never seen it. It was something I always associated with the generation just before mine, the dreaded ‘baby boomers’. Some slightly older friends tried to drag me along to it in the early eighties. ‘After all, it is a Martin Scorsese film.’ Yeah, but a Martin Scorsese film with Neil Diamond! Still, there are certain films that no-one can resist when the DVD is going for $8.95. I assume you’re all familiar with Tommy Boy. So, come the night of my forty-first, with my wife out of town, I cranked the volume up to eleven and settled back on the couch, determined to get suitably pissed and fast-forward through the Neil Diamond bit.
I had no idea who The Band were, but I’d recently heard ‘The Weight’ on the radio and found myself singing along in the car like someone in a GoldFM commercial, and marvelling at how it was actually a pretty good song before Jimmy Barnes got his hands on it. But, early on, out comes someone called Ronnie Hawkins, who launches into:
I just turned forty-one, and I don’t mind dyin’…
That’s what you want to hear on the eve of your forty-first birthday, pissed, alone on the couch and feeling sorry for yourself.
Try telling someone who’s fifty-one that forty-one feels old and you’ll get a knowing smile that suggests you have no idea what’s just around the corner. As for someone in their seventies – well, you wouldn’t dare say anything, unless you were looking for a clip around the ear.
Most people my age have kids to make them feel old, but my wife and I are part of that somehow suspect group of people standing over at the side, looking at their shoes, whenever some politician starts tossing around the word ‘family’; selfish couples who don’t want children. Other forty-one-year-olds have the blooming sophistication of their own offspring to point out how they’ve become daggy and unfashionable. We have to rely on far subtler signposts...
Until about two years ago, I would read both the local street press publications from cover to cover, down to every last Fred Negro curlicue. Then I started to notice how, when I got to the dance music section in the middle, I’d slide my hand through to the back page, flip the entire silvery supplement over, and make for the live reviews at the back, in the hope that someone I recognised, like You Am I, had done a gig that week.
I have a nephew who’s sixteen and one of his subjects at school is Cinema Studies. He actually gets to watch movies at school. The only films we got to see had names like Imagine a World Without Magnesium and That Lathe Could Take Your Foot Off.
‘What sort of films?’ I asked him.
‘The classics, mainly,’ he replied.
‘Like what?’
‘Well, last week we had to watch the first “Matrix”.’
Had to watch? To have seen The Matrix as part of a class at school in the seventies, would be, for today’s sixteen-year-old, like having a naked Jessica Alba walk in during Biology.
Growing up, I always found it curious that, on TV, Dad was constantly disappearing into the toilet with a folded newspaper. All my friends’ toilets had magazine racks next to them, stuffed with half-finished puzzle books and maps. But who the hell had time to read in the toilet? You go in, do your business and leave about a minute-and-a-half later, don’t you? Then I hit forty-one, and suddenly I’m heading off to the dunny with a copy of The Brothers Karamazov and, ten minutes later, wondering whether I shouldn’t have brought Middlemarch as well.
And, finally, a couple of weeks ago I was at something I still feel five years too young to be calling a ‘dinner party’, when I spotted a book peeking from the shelf behind the host’s head: Gangland by Mark Davis, the 1997 firecracker that blew the lid off the media in Australia. There on the front cover was my name, attached to a mildly pithy quote in which I announced myself to be thirty-three and fed up with the ‘cardigan-wearers’ clogging up the industry. The book was only eight years old and already it felt like a relic. As I returned it to the shelf, I observed my companions looking at me with fixed grins. Well, not really at me. At my cardigan.
June 2005.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Most recently, he directed new episodes of ‘The Librarians’, which returns to ABC1 on October 13.
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