Another Birthday.
Created | Updated May 25, 2008
Well it’s my birthday today, yet another year on the cock and few more miles on the clock, hard to believe it really, fifty seven years have gone by, and I just do not know where they all went. I know I have lived them as I have all the physical and emotional scars to prove it, yet it just seems to me like I have lost a few years along the way, as I do not feel like I am fifty seven years old. A few years ago, when I got the news from the doctor that my working life was over, I wrote a story called "Finished at Fifty" which was basically all the thoughts and memories that went through my mind that day as I walked back home from the doctors surgery. All those memories, both good and bad came rushing back as I made my home, and by the time I had arrived at our front door, I had it all written down in my mind. So it was quite easy for me to write as it just flowed to my fingers from my mind, in fact my fingers could hardly keep up, so much so that I had a lot of changes to make once I had activated the spellchecker. It was the longest piece that I have ever written, yet it never saw the light of day, and is stored on a disc where hopefully it might be found long after I have gone, for someone to read. I did print out one copy, but that was just to use up the last of the ink in my printer, as it was due to be changed. So the quality of the print itself is not all that good as the text seems to fade on a few of the last pages. Its in a drawer some where in this house, but I have no idea where.
It has been a quiet birthday for me really, but then again so has the past few as well, as I can not drink any alcohol of any kind with the medication I have to take for my back pain. Mind you, I am not all that bothered about drinking much, as I seem to have gone off drink altogether over the past few years. I remember my Dad saying to me a long time back as New Year time, that there would come a day when drinking would not be so important in my life, and I remember replying with something like, Oh! I don’t think so, but as usual he was right, as that day did come for me, all be it not through my choice. My Dad was not always tea total, as he used to tell us stories of his days when he was younger and about his time in the RAF during the war and his time in Palestine after it ended before he got back home to the U.K. I never could imagine him as a young man, until one day years ago when I was about thirteen, I found a box of old photographs while clearing the cupboard under the stairs. I found a photo of him leaning on the door post of his mother’s house, wearing his motor bike leather jacket and his old RAF flying boots, he looked totally different without his beard and moustache and his short hair. He hated having his cut and always had it brushed back and long at the back, even when he was an ordained priest, just before he died.
It just got me wondering if any of my kids would find such a box at some time in the future and find old photos of me when I was younger, but I suppose that never happen, as since the divorce some seventeen years ago, my daughters have never been in contact with me at all. Well, that is not totally true, I do get the odd Email from my youngest one, who now actually lives about a forty minute drive from where I live, but try as I may, I never seem to get any closer to her, not even her phone number, still we live in hope Eh! In fact I do have about a dozen boxes of photos of my time in the Navy, but they are all on slides, as that tended to be the way of things back in those days. Yet being slides has kept them in very good condition, but I don’t know how I am ever going to hand them down, as it were, seeing as I have no contact with my daughters, maybe Mk2 will send them on for me, once I have popped my clogs a sit were. Oh! I am not feeling sorry for myself in any way, as I have now have a new family with Mk2s kids, two sons and a daughter, and of course their kids, I am actually a Granddad to four young nippers, who keep me young! In fact, just the other day when Mk2 sons were here giving her the latest news about their Dad, who is presently in hospital with throat cancer and had been asked by the staff to submit a short list of people who could be allowed into the intensive care unit to visit him, and they included me onto their list. We have come a long way since all the animosity and bad feelings that we had when Mk2 and I first got together all those years ago. It just goes to show how much things can change given time, its just a pity that my own two daughters did not accept things over the years.
Any way, that’s all old hat stuff now, and its the future we are looking at now, and that alone can be daunting enough. I am now receiving help with counselling sessions for the PTSD they say I have, and the bouts of depression that comes along with it. It has been a year since my name was put on the list for this help, and now that I am going through it, things are now beginning to look a bit better all round. Not much they can do about the back injury though, and that will cause more problems as I get older, or so I have been told by the doctors I have seen so far, but for now its bearable and I can still get around and do just about everything that I need to do.
So here is to yet another birthday, another year notched up on the clock, I just wonder what will be in store for my next one?
Smudger. 5/08.
