I recall from my youth hearing old folks talk about what was important to them. Mostly they talked about how well they slept, or the weather, or perhaps how the rheumatism was acting up. Once in a while they said the world was going to hell in a handbasket.
Well, I don’t have rheumatism, and of course the world IS going to hell in a handbasket, but that is such common knowledge it is hardly worth mentioning. You do NOT want to get me started about sleep . . .
That pretty much leaves just the weather, which is the real reason I am writing. It is raining. I am under the roof of our gazebo. Wood blazes in the fireplace next to me. Long yellow fingers dance over red glowing embers. I hear the pitter-patter of raindrops. Sometimes, for five or twenty minutes, the pitter-patter becomes something more intense. It becomes vaguely threatening, but without being scary, like when a shih-poo barks at a rottweiler.
The summers here are dry. Weeks, even months, go by without a drop of rain. Cactus and palm trees, plants that send their roots more downward rather than outward, they do well, but almost all else dies unless irrigated. This probably has something to do with the bliss that I feel sitting by the fire, listening to the rain.
Or maybe it’s the Old Fashioned, made with maple syrup and quality bourbon.
You might infer from my essay about Tate Modern, where I dumped on a beloved contemporary art museum, art films, and giant spiders, that I am hard to impress. I see why you might think that.
Today I dispel that perception by writing positively. I write about a work of art that left me in awe. It is not a painting, or a sculpture, or a movie. It is not music, and neither poetry nor prose. It is not, as you might otherwise soon surmise, a building.
My previous missive described how Denise and I swapped homes with friends from Harpenden, England. Harpenden is just twenty or twenty-five minutes, by train, from London. This allowed us to visit London regularly. We would go there, make surprised exclamations about how expensive everything was, and then take the train back to Harpenden.
Of course London has more to offer than just absurdly high prices. Some of the world’s best museums are there, and they offer free admission. And so does Tate Modern.
Some patriots refer to the USA as their “Motherland.” Others call it the “Fatherland.” I do not know which is correct; but, until our country’s gender identity is resolved, the United States should be banned from women’s sports.
I did not intentionally join the Old Farts Club (“OFC”). But when you are in a foreign country you gravitate to people who speak English. These are fellow ex-pats, most of whom are retired. There are some young people who work remotely, but their prostates and backs and joints all are in good working order, which leaves just the weather to talk about with them. Social tides moved me to the OFC, like in Animal House, when that jerk Niedermeyer guides Pinto and Flounder to the Omega House corner reserved for nerds.
I play padel several times a week. I am one of the older players and so am routinely humbled by my slow reflexes. But my teammates and opponents, and other ex-pat friends, (mostly) are retired, so they are not spring chickens themselves. Some of them made enough money that they could comfortably retire in their 50’s. Others, like Denise and I, did not. In the U.S. these groups would live in different neighborhoods and belong to different clubs. Here, we all go to the same parties and play golf or padel together. It is like when I lived in college dorms and roomed with kids from all walks of life, except there is a lot less binge drinking and sexual tension.
Back when we were in the U.S., working for a living, I was a lawyer and Denise was a teacher. We mostly socialized with lawyers and teachers and told stories and jokes about lawyering and teaching. But we in the OFC don’t talk about our old lives. Of course there are common introductory questions like, “Why did you move to Spain?” or “How did you pick Alicante?” But only rarely do the inquiries delve deeper than that. If someone lets slip that they were a mechanic or doctor or lawyer or salesman, they immediately change the subject to their recent visit to a European capital. It’s almost like we are all in witness protection, concerned that too much historical information might result in mob retribution. But the truth is, we just find our former iterations less interesting than the present.
It’s weird being an old fart. Believe it or not, I spent my entire life younger than I am now. Being old seems like a recent aberration, like hemorrhoids; something I should be able to fix with the right cream or pill. But by hanging out together we old farts at least can maintain the illusion that our condition is “normal,” just as we thought youth was normal, back in the day when boomers ruled and we were getting things done.
It is easy to maintain the illusion of normalcy when my age-peers and I play padel during the week and the courts are mostly occupied by retirees. But then comes the weekend, and the courts and cafés are teeming with people who are impossibly young. They are beautiful and energetic and play really, really, well. Suddenly my friends and I are in the minority, and it’s not a cool minority, like Idris Elba and Halle Berry at the Oscars.
No, we definitely are in the Omega House nerd corner. We do nothing productive. We don’t flirt or try to impress each other. All we do is get up when we want, read books, play sports (maybe), paint (maybe), watch movies, travel, and talk over wine, beer, or coffee.
Come to think of it, the Omega House nerd corner ain’t all bad.
Alicante, Spain, is a great place to live, but it is an art desert. You have to look pretty hard to find a gallery, and if you want a very good gallery, you have to look on the other side of the Pyrenees.
Some folks describe things as “very unique.” They are the same careless people who say “irregardless,” “ATM machine,” or “He’s a politician I can trust.” The rest of us know there are no gradations of uniqueness. Something is one-of-a-kind, or it is not.