Tell me why I don't like endings
The switch from thinking mostly about the future, to thinking mainly about the past, has happened rather too quickly
I had an 'old' moment recently. You know what I mean by that. One of those moments when you realise you're not what you were, i.e. young.
It's a pretty embarrassing story actually. If I was to give it a title, it would be The Naked Arse.
We decided as a family to explore a new length of motorway north out of Auckland. Nothing fancy, just a drive up the new section of road to see where it ends. We jumped in the car in our weekend sloppy clothes (who am I kidding, I spend every day all day in these clothes!), grabbed Maccas coffees and headed up to the very end of the motorway, to a town called Warkworth — where we stopped to go have a wee in the public toilets.
Which is where my ‘old’ moment happened.
I was standing at the urinal doing my thing, but something didn't feel right. It had been a while since I'd been to a public toilet, what with the pandemic and then working from home — it's just not something I've done for a few years. Even so, I remembered what doing it felt like, and this didn't feel like what I remembered. I just couldn't put my finger on it ...
Then there it was. Another breeze across my naked bottom. I didn’t remember it ever feeling like that. And that’s because never, in all the years of going to a public toilet, had I dropped my pants to my knees. That's something you do at home. Indeed, it's something I've been doing at home for years, all the way through the pandemic, during which I never had to wear actual trousers with a zipper, just tracksuit pants — which are begging to be dropped to the knees when standing over the loo.
After years of doing this in the privacy of my own ensuite, it had become a habit ... a habit I'd absent-mindedly taken into the public arena, so that on one Saturday morning in the small town of Warkworth at the end of the motorway, I was being suddenly 'old', and standing in a public toilet with my pants down around my knees, my naked arse exposed for all to see.
I've been thinking about getting old a lot recently. A doctor last week told me that I'm still a young man (and indeed, dropping your pants to have a wee is something a three-year-old boy would do), which is ironic because I was there about an 'old' type of medical issue, which is this: The week after Christmas, my Apple Watch told me that my heart had been in atrial fibrillation 60% of the entire week. That’s 4.2 days. It was a bit of a shock, because I know what AF feels like and I hadn't felt the symptoms at all. A couple of days later, my heart was back in sinus rhythm (I checked, with my Watch), so I allowed myself to relax. But a whole week later, my Apple Watch informed me I was not only back in AF, but I’d been there 100% of the week. The same again the following week. And the next. Indeed, I was in AF the whole month of January.
Another irony — this was the year I was determined to get back to the pool to stave off the ageing process and rediscover my youthful svelte physique (which actually was never very svelte at all).
But swimming is difficult when your heart feels like jazz percussion at the end of every lap.
Speaking of jazz drummers.
People have asked me from time to time over the years what I enjoy about jazz. To be honest, it’s never really that polite. And it’s not usually in the form of a fully constructed sentence. Actually, they don’t use words at all. They just grunt, and I feel beholden to explain what it is that I enjoy about jazz, even though they haven’t asked and they probably don’t even care.
My answer is always the same: jazz is the music that most closely resonates with how I feel inside.
Didn’t that turn out to be prophetic when my heart went into Persistent AF!
If you didn’t know already, AF describes the erratic inter-relationship between the lower chambers of your heart and the upper chambers. They basically don’t beat in sync, so that the flow of blood from the upper chambers to the lower chamber is compromised. AF is so erratic that it doesn't feel like a rhythm at all — which I suppose is how jazz sounds to many people, especially the jazz I feel most at home with. An album like Roy Brook's Understanding, for example, a live recording with Woody Shaw, Carlos Garnett, Harold Mabern and Cecil McBee, is barred from the turntable if anyone else is in the house. I once had it playing as background during dinner when my daughter and her boyfriend were over with a friend, and didn't notice that the friend was gradually edging closer to a convulsive fit until I turned the music off.
Imagine living with that polyrhythm inside you. Is it any wonder the chambers of my heart can't keep proper time.
So for the first month of this year, when most people were thinking about starting over, I couldn't help but think about endings. And not just the end of a motorway.
I'd been conscious of heading in this direction for a while. I'd been noticing things ... in the way I look, and the way I move ... which felt kinda 'old'.
Some examples:
More hair in the nose and ears. I spent a whole morning cleaning out my ears and nostrils with tweezers, and by the time I was done I had enough to make a moustache.
Hyper-vigilance about activity in front of our house. You know all about the ageing man shaking his fist at people letting their dogs dump on their lawn. Well, yes, I do that. But I also get angry at people parking on the road, beyond the lawn. The other day I even filmed a couple, who decided that was the ideal spot to make out. When his head disappeared into her lap, I thought, Not on my watch buddy, and marched right out there … to check the letterbox. They dutifully drove away.
Excess weight accumulating in all the wrong places. Like in my armpits. And inside the crease line beneath my belly where my belt used to go, back when I needed one.
Moving sideways down the stairs. Like a crab.
Reading glasses. On top of my head.
Baring my bum in a public toilet in Warkworth because I’ve forgotten how to pee standing up.
Purely by chance I've been reading a book about endings by one of my favourite writers, Geoff Dyer. His book The Last Days of Roger Federer is not really (or not just) about Roger Federer. It’s about a great many people, and how endings have played out in their lives and careers. People like Bob Dylan, whose ending has taken decades.
Endings, as I’m discovering, often don’t happen all at once. Not in real life. They happen slowly, over time, giving us a chance to stave them off for a while, or at least providing us with the illusion that staving them off is possible. One more cruel irony to add to all the others.
Dyer puts it this way:
You plan carefully, do everything correctly and then, at some point, something unpredictable, random, and entirely unforeseeable happens. You fix it. You continue on until the next setback.
I don’t process endings well, I’ve discovered. Did I say ‘well’? I mean not at all.
For example, with relationships I’ve had that have ended, I continue to think about them as much as I did when they were active. It feels like King Canute attempting to hold back the tide — in my version, I’m keeping past relational dynamics alive in my imagination to avoid confronting the reality that those things are, actually, lost. Those people are actually gone. Which I guess must be unbearable for me, which is why I resile to the space in my head where those past friendships still have future possibilities.
One of the things I love about jazz is that a recorded piece of jazz music never really comes to an end. What I mean by that is that when you take the needle off the jazz record and put the vinyl away, it’s like an amazing conversation between friends being put on pause until they meet again. When you drop the needle the next time, you’re right back where you were.
Not all jazz records do this for me. Some sessions are less open-ended than others. I like Dave Brubeck but his records feel more finite. But a Bill Evans record, or a Coltrane, or a Miles ... they feel like they go on and on. A kind of eternity. Which I imagine is what heaven must feel like, if one exists — a beautiful dynamic moment that never gets old, never gets stale, never ends.
Speaking of jazz reminds me once more of Geoff Dyer, who’s also written one of the best books on jazz you’ll ever read, But Beautiful.
Writing about Charles Mingus, Dyer says this:
Like flamenco — he'd realized this years ago in Tijuana — the movement of jazz was centrifugal, you felt it like a pulse constantly escaping the body, moving from the heart outward, leaving in its wake tapping feet and clicking fingers that registered the intensity of its movement like leaves in the wind. Paralysis was the exact denial or contradiction of that movement of jazz: it started at the extremities, at the fingers and toes, and worked its way inward, working its way to the heart, obliterating all trace of its progress.
The centrifugal movement of jazz like leaves in the wind … like a boisterous conversation between lovers … like the spirit of God … like children playing in grass … the opposite of ageing and of feeling old … a kind of eternal youthfulness that flies in the face of the ageing process, even one that messes with the rhythms of the heart.
There's no ending like losing a friend. Especially one with whom you have an ongoing dialogue that feels like a jazz session.
Deborah was a reader of this Substack, so this one’s for her.
I didn't even know she was sick. I saw it online, just a couple of weeks ago. Not that she was sick — but that she had died. In this age of social media, I’m not sure what is more brutal — the death of a friend, or the discovery of their passing through the muslin shroud of Facebook.
It took a full 10 minutes to comprehend what I was reading. The last time we met up, some 14 months ago admittedly, there was no sign it would be the last. Deborah was full of life and grace. In her movement, and her humble curiosity, not to mention her love for people trying to get by in some of the harshest environments on the planet, she was like flamenco.
Her ending didn’t happen quickly. I read that there had been sickness. But from my place in her world, it was all too sudden.
If only we really could stave off the ending of things.
I've just read the last book in a series of 15. I'm still processing the ending of that journey and the future absence of the characters in my life.
Also as a poet I love the notion that a poem is never finished. There is always something to improve on.
Sorry about your friend. As I grow older more and more Facebook posts are about the passing of online contacts. It reminds me of my mother saying all she seemed to do was go to funerals in her later years.
Oh no, sorry to hear about Deborah :(