Marija Ruljancich celebrates her 110th birthday with generations of her family - Simon Schluternone
Ageing Is a Roller Coaster: Enjoy the Ride while You Can
By Tony Wright
Melbourne, Australia
My father, having had a glass of whisky at his 80th birthday party, drew me aside and said he needed to discuss something important.
“Does it ever feel,” he asked, “even though the years move on, that inside, you are still about 25 or 30?”
Why, yes, I said. I suspect most of us feel that way.
“That’s a relief,” my father sighed. “I thought I was the only one.”
Ageing. It’s a tricky subject, not least because many of us don’t actually feel our age, as my father observed.
He lived another 14 years beyond that 80th party, and I suspect he never surrendered the idea that, inside, he was not much older than 30.
What does it mean to feel your age, anyway? Maybe it’s something that others load onto you without your consent.
The posts move. A long time ago, I felt anyone who got to 40 or 50 was pretty old. Now I think maybe 80 or 90 is getting on a bit, and even that’s disputable.
There is a wisecrack that has been doing the rounds for a few years that demands “is it time to start worrying about what sort of world we will leave for Keith Richards?”
Since he and Mick Jagger established the Rolling Stones in 1962, he’s been squeezing more out of life than most of us might dare imagine, and he clearly has no plan to quit.
That Richards is scheduled to turn 80 in December makes him the Baby Boomers’ living quip about something approaching immortality.
Country music has an even more indestructible troubadour who has never displayed any intention of acting his age. Willie Nelson, a connoisseur of perception-altering substances, turned 90 a few weeks ago, still playing his beaten-up old guitar, still employing what is among the most distinctive voices in modern music.
“I can hear the wind blowing in my mind, just the way it used to,” he sang as he took the stage at his 90th birthday concert at the Hollywood Bowl on April 30.
A near endless line-up of rock and country nobility played, but when Willie sang We Had It All , who did he invite to be up there with him? Why, Keith Richards, of course. Both of them defying that stranger called age.
Maybe neither of them is so old, anyway.
I once enjoyed rollicking laughter-filled afternoons with a grand-aunt not long before she packed it in a few days before her 104th birthday.
My mother and most of her sisters made it way into their 90s — two of them got to 99 — still reminiscing about the parties of their youth and late adulthood that went all night around a piano, as if they were ready to do it all again.
The other day, I spoke to a family celebrating the 110th birthday of mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother Marija Ruljancich . She still lives at home in Hawthorn with her son.
I wrote that she was Victoria’s oldest living person.
The ink was barely dry on the newsprint when I learned that a Victorian woman born in Calabria and named Olga Abate had celebrated her 110th birthday last month. She enjoys a sip of wine and is by all reports enjoying life. And she, too, still lives at home.
In their quieter moments, do Olga and Marija feel inside that they are as old as the rest of us think they must? I doubt it.
And what of society’s view? Is pension age — 67 in Australia now — society’s absurd definition of old?
The pension age has crept up a bit in recent years, but the choice of the mid-60s as a suitable age for retirement was set long ago, when life’s twilight came early. We all know people in their 60s these days who would be appalled if you placed them anywhere beyond middle age.
Conversely, an acquaintance bored everyone silly for years by twisting our ears about the blessed time he would turn 65, when “the golden eagle” would visit with his fat pension.
Sure enough, he retired on his 65th birthday and drove his unretired mates mad by calling them at work and inviting them for an impossible round of midweek golf or lunch at the pub.
He lasted about six months sitting in front of the TV, increasingly despondent, perhaps wondering where life went, before a heart attack took him. How different things might have been if he’d allowed himself to imagine that inside, he was still 25 or 30?
Not everyone can live long or well, of course. Illness or other dire circumstance can — and does — intrude. Chef, author and TV documentary presenter Anthony Bourdain didn’t make old age: he succumbed to clinical depression and took his own life at 61.
But first he packed in a vast store of living, travelling the world to sample the food and cultures of ordinary people, merrily exploring the human condition while apparently never growing old.
He left behind much sage advice about relishing an open, inquiring attitude — the sort of thing we all knew when we were young.
“Your body is not a temple,” he said. “It’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.” – Melbourne Age
