New Look — Old Issue

Yesterday, I dyed my hair.

It’s not as dramatic an opening sentence as «Hier, maman est morte», Yesterday, Mommy died, from Camus’ L’Etranger, but it’ll serve to let you know my frame of mind.

Anyway, the new look has a lot to do with the ‘old’ issue. By that I mean the issue of growing old. Check the photo on the right. See the light brown hair? If you had only the top of the head to go on, you might think me younger than I am. Sadly, the rest of the body gives the game away — but I’m working on that, too.

On its package the hair treatment promised a gentle transformation, a restoration of colour while retaining some distinguishing grey. Notwithstanding the promise made, my daughter didn’t see anything different about me and my old friend, Doug, only remarked over lunch today that he thought I’d had a haircut. Perhaps he was too polite to say more, or maybe he didn’t notice the difference either. He knew me when my hair was legitimately brown.

It is a well known fact that people become invisible as they age. It hasn’t happened to me yet, but I have observed some of my older friends, who are quite solidly visible to me, treated as if they were not there. It can only be because younger people are not able to see them, can’t it?

Then again, older people have been around for so long that they sometimes become part of the furniture, and treated as such. This happens in families, and in workplaces, too, which are often just like families only with more politics. It may well be that some cases of senile dementia are just ways used by the elderly to get themselves noticed. A bit like Tom Ballard in the old TV show Waiting for God.

I am reminded — infuriatingly, several times a night — that parts of me are aging. At other times it takes a miserable failure to remind me of that fact. For example, I often see fences or gates that I could have easily hurdled in my youth. A painful failure a few years ago to clear one such gate in a country field now stops me in my tracks whenever I am tempted to chance a leap over anything higher than a couple of feet.

(At this point I have to provide a link to metric converter for those who have fallen for the continental system: http://www.worldwidemetric.com/metcal.htm.)

But, thank God, the temptation is still there. It will be a sad day when I can no longer see myself doing such things, or recall in my limbs what it felt like to be jumping six feet in the air (before the Fosbury Flop was invented) or putting the shot over 50 feet. That day will mark the beginning of my downward spiral into the six-foot deep trench. I need to remind myself that this body was once capable of that, and more, and that I still have the medals and press cuttings to prove it.

It’s all very well to look back and remember what it felt like to be an athlete, but an older body still needs to be challenged. I haven’t completely figured out what to do about that yet, but I have some ideas. I am choosing to walk instead of taking the car (although the cold weather might put paid to that very soon). It’s been a while since I have done any downhill skiing; that’s going to change this winter. We haven’t sailed for ages — not since we sold our cruiser over ten years ago — but we’re going to go sailing next year. Maybe it’ll take a while to get back into action, but let’s do it!

You’re only as old as you feel, they say. When you age, you’re probably only as young as you look, too. That is, if they can see you at all.

The hair’s a start.