Thanks for your wishes and birthday kisses

Gaston de Rosayro

Allow me thank everyone who sent their heartfelt wishes to me on my birthday last week. Well that is me. I am 60 something and one week old. Born on the fifth of July.

Well you know, it is the day after the day the Yanks celebrate their independence with a great deal of shouting and shooting fireworks.

That is the day they all get teary-eyed with patriotic emotion and sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘God Bless America.’ They will sing along, that is, until the second verse begins and nobody knows the words. As the night skies around them exploded with spectacular showers of pyrotechnics all my relatives and friends in Yankee-Doodle-Dandy-Land started calling and wished me on the landmark occasion.

I thought that was really nice. Imagine the whole of the North American continent celebrating their National Day, which according to the International Dateline falls on my birthday. Still I am eternally grateful to my parents for having had the sense to disregard my mad grand-aunt Topsy’s suggestion to christen me Amerigo Vespucci. Remember him? He is the Italian navigator chappie who the great continent is named after.

Gaston is not a bad alternative though, although gaggles of little girls often erroneously associate me with the sexist and chauvinistic character of the same name of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Anyway that is neither here nor there. And besides, it is a totally unfounded and unfair observation. A beastly reflection no less.

But let me tell you that the pain of ageing is not something you want to hear when you are turning 60. Which to be perfectly honest was, actually more than a half dozen years ago. Oh, all right I am not ashamed of my age but I do not want to shout about it from the rooftop. Although that is what the dreadful little grandkids have been doing a week before the big day. My crazy cousin Phillip and his wife Nelum called from Mississippi and wished me good health and fortune.

Phillip is called Pippo for short and because Manel’s name is synonymous with the lotus or olu we call them Olu-Pippi from Mississippi. Now Pippi who appeared to have had one too many turned the ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ into what distinctly sounded like ‘The Star-Mangled Spanner’! Hey what is gone wrong with the Yanks? While drinking and driving is against the law in the US and A, Congress has not yet had the foresight to ban drinking and singing.

All right I am digressing. But I just thought that you might enjoy that little aside. Anyway to get on with it.... Now where was I? Oh yes, as I was saying I do not want to proclaim my age from the rooftop. It is just that I cannot get on the rooftop because my back is kind of sore, and my knees are getting creaky. But does that bother me? Not at all. See, I am still young enough to kid around.

And I really do not feel like I am getting older. Make me 15 years younger for a day and I would feel a difference, but right now, I feel as though I can do all the things I did when I was 21. Other than date, because my wife expressly forbids that.

I am sure I am naive about ageing. I have probably gained weight in the last 15 years, and I have definitely lost hair. I might be a step slower, and not just when I have two toddling grandkids clinging to my legs. But the thing with ageing is that it does not have the formal rites of passage that come with growing up. As an adult, you do not have to take a first step, start kindergarten, hit puberty or hit a couple of cops in the chops and run like the blazes. You just start seeing gray hairs and need thicker lenses to read the news print.

Suddenly, just a few years after you were the world’s hope for the future, you are part of the past. You are a sir instead of dude, ‘machang’ and mate. Still I am grateful that despite my age I did not have to suffer the indignity my old classmate ‘Heman’ Herman went through. Poor Herman was sent to the supermarket by his wife to buy some diapers for their grandson. He approached a smart looking female supervisor and inquired in which aisle they stocked diapers. She gave him the once-over and responded: “Adult or baby?”

Someone told me that there is a Sri Lankan born every twenty minutes. Do you know what this means? It means there is going to be one more young person in a country that already seems to be overrun by young people. I do not know when the whole world became so young. I can remember when I was young. Back then, the whole world looked pretty old.

But now, everywhere I go I see young people. And they are getting younger and younger. People in college, people starting off in business, new parents. Every year they all look younger and younger to me. This all really hit home the other day when I bumped into an old member of our joint school music society at a popular Colombo shopping mall. I swear the girl with the sweetest voice in the neighbouring convent had turned even better looking with the passage of time.

I was really taken aback because I thought that the girls of the Good Shepherd stay the same age while we balding old-Bens get older. Had the Shepherdians drunk from the mystical ‘Fountain of Youth’ while we Devils of St. Bens had not even gargled in its waters?

I was about to throw my arms around her when a familiar matronly figure appeared behind the youthful avatar. Of course I had been deceived. I realised I had mistaken the daughter for the mother whose image of more than 40 years had sprung to my mind. I now recognised the singing nightingale Rani by her voice rather than her physical appearance. She said in her still melodious voice: “Hello Gaston. I observed you looking at our Ramya. Must have reminded you of me when we on stage together!”

Regaining my composure quickly I said: “Gosh Rani she is the spitting image of you when you were a schoolgirl! No daughter could have looked more like her mother!” Rani’s tinkling laughter in honeyed duet with the lovely child’s echoed through the shopping mall as she quipped: “Off by an entire generational gap, Gassie Boy! Ramya is my grand-daughter!”

Then they both kissed me! Twice over actually after I mentioned it was my birthday! Belated greetings of the same variety would not be taken amiss, but only from my feminine readers.

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