Trees grow unnoticed in older age as the imagined world of youth falls away, writes MICHAEL HARDING
LAST WEEK I went to the funeral of a man my own age, and nobody seemed to think it unusual that a person my age should be stretched in a coffin.
“He wasn’t a young man,” they said, though he was only in his fifties.
At the removal I sat in the back pew wondering where time had gone since he and I were young.
Later I checked into an old- fashioned hotel in the middle of town and I got chatting to the night porter, a white-haired man in his 70s.
I asked him did he find the nights long.
“Well,” he said, “between the discos and the residents lounge, there’s always something to keep me occupied.”
I told him that I was a night porter, years ago, in a hospital in Cavan.
The phone number was Cavan-89, but it rarely rang at night, and apart from the routine chores of mopping the toilets and the sluice room, there was plenty of silence and moonlight at the porter’s desk, to allow me live in the imagined world.
The hospital is still there, but it has been greatly extended. I had a cup of tea in the cafeteria last week, after visiting a relation who was admitted, with a kidney infection.
At the till, I produced €10, for a mug of tea, but the woman said, “We don’t take cash anymore; you need a visitor’s card.”
“So where can I get one?” I asked.
“Here.”
She handed me the card, and said,
“That will be €10.”
“That’s a bit expensive for a tea bag,” I said.
“You can go to the machine outside and change the visitor’s card back into cash,” she explained.
So I bought the card, she swiped it, I took it to the machine in the corridor, which returned me €9, and finally I got my cup of tea.
When I was young, the hospital had no cafeteria at all, and not many visitors. It used to be a sanatorium for TB patients, and we were always told to avoid the grounds, because people believed that the spittle on the avenues might be contagious, and that TB might creep up from the soles of our shoes into our lungs.
My shoes were always mucky because I spent my life hiding behind trees on the hill in front of our house, to avoid being shot by cowboys.
The worst that ever happened me was that I twisted my ankle, and had to stay away from school one day, and my mother brought me the Beano when she came home from town on her bicycle.
One day the trees on the hill were cut down and the trunks were blown up. I remember the explosions rattling the windowpanes, and splattering mud on the façade of our house, and my mother standing at the window, terrified that the glass would break. And I thought she had a tear in her eye that day, but I was afraid to ask her why.
Why they wanted to dynamite the trees, I’m not sure. I think it was because they intended to make a sloping lawn for grazing horses, and perhaps JCBs had not yet been invented.
The work was never finished, and no horse ever grazed there. Instead the big stumps lay on their sides for years, making wonderful bunkers where cowboys could die.
As cowboys we couldn’t care less about TB or old age, or the hearse that paused regularly outside various houses along the road; calling, one day, for the man who collapsed in the tool shed, and the next day, for the old lady who was found at the foot of the stairs, and eventually, for all the other elders, when their time was up.
And in time saplings on the hill grew into tall trees once again, but we didn’t notice them, because we had grown up, and exchanged all that imagined world for real life.
In my hotel bedroom, I lay awake most of the night, stretched on the little bed, just like John Wayne, listening to footsteps on the corridor and the hissing of old radiators.
At breakfast the night porter was still on duty. I wondered what kind of a night he had, but I didn’t ask. Instead I just paid my bill and headed off down town, for the funeral.