Shelf Life

Charles Waterstreet

Thursday, 2nd October 2008

Two funerals and a birthday party lead me to wonder — is there life before death?

One of the problems with a 60th birthday party is that there are too many candles, too little cake. You suddenly realise that the past is the future with a date certain. An unusually cruel god appears to be exacting an enormous price on the generation that had the gall and the desire to be eternally young. So many of the women were wearing headscarves. Hindsight is not only a lovely karma sutra position but if we spent more money on the war on cancer and less on the war on drugs then there might be a lot more people at this party. In this episode of Survivor-60 the participants are thankfully wearing name tags to avoid senior-moments putting that face with what name. The Facebook generation will be constantly updated and such embarrassment will be a thing of the past unless of course they run out of water. The iPhones flashed one another, were turned sideways, and we finger-scrolled pictures of our children, at last moving to our tiniest command and then finally called taxis to take us home. To boomers they could have easily been called me-phones. In the future a family Christmas may be a long video conference call. Purchasing the appropriate sixtieth present is an art form. People either have too much or nothing at all. I have a dozen copies of The Power Of Now for such occasions.

Flying into Albury for yet another funeral, this time my dear uncle Ray Munz, I could see the severity of the long drought which could be measured by the height of the dead trees poking out of the shallow Hume Weir like a large bed of distorted nails. It must have been a relief to the gravedigger when he decided to take advantage of the loosening of restrictions from Rome on cremation. The Pope is infallible, but can be flexible when thinking green. He keeps a sharp divide between the ecclesiastical and the ecological. As a teenager in the South-East Asia theatre, Ray flirted with death on a daily basis; flying Kittyhawks, Mustangs and a Spitfire on loan from an American pilot in bombing and strafing missions against the Japanese. Like many true heroes of the second world war, Ray never blew his own trumpet. If it wasn’t for his aviator’s log book noting a loss of a rudder in flight, the shooting down of a plane in his formation and the fraying black-and-white photos of him in a leather flying cap (which I lusted for as a boy), you would never know how truly brave the boys from country farms became. At 17, he went from sitting behind the wheel of a harvester to a Kittyhawk in eight days. In his final three years as a teenager he survived things far worse than cremation. After the war he became a wool classer and was world-renowned as the fastest wool auctioneer. It sounded completely like another language. Ironically, he spent much of his working life selling wool to the Japanese. We can be sure that he extracted a very high price.

Back in Sydney and standing on Elizabeth Street, waiting for the lights to change, an old lover appears across the street. My heart beats for lost time, it warms and the appropriate words begin to form in my brain shuffling their way down to my mouth. The lights change and I see beside her, her very tall, very rich, now retired banker husband. As the crowd sets off my old lover tries to hide behind her now much wider side-stepping husband. How time changes the hue and colour of blood-red love. One now needs not only avert one’s eyes, but one’s attention from the past lest it bites. The past is another country lad.