Old age

Saturday was the last straw. Or maybe it was Sunday. I dunno, I get easily confused these days. No, actually it was fifth year English last week. Some of those pupils are as feral as a bearded-lady from a circus but most of them are smart. At least most of the time I don't smell burning when I ask them to think.... You see, at the moment we are charging through WB Yeats, and as sometimes happens' we arrived at 'The Wild Swans at Coole'. Not a bad poem but it can be tough for a teenage pupil to relate to an auld fella harping on about getting slower and feeling ancient. What has getting old got to do with the visceral energy of youth?
I guess those type of poems are written by saddened men remembering that energy and feeling, pretty sick that it ain't there any longer.
Imagine cycling up to Graignamanagh to chase up a girlfriend after cycling 200km that day already and then cycling home in the moonlight later? ENERGY!!!!!
Imagine working 12-hour days driving machinery or hanging out of a scaffold on a building site loading blocks before dawn in January and not being tired. ENERGY!
Imagine nothing phasing you as you leave your country and don't know how it's gonna work out or how long you'll be gone for! ENERGY!
Shakespeare wrote about time running out, Robert Frost wrote about his Autumn too. Yeats had a lot to regret. His unrequited love is famous. The most famous crash and burn of the literary set. He stares at the swans and wishes he was paired-off too instead of being the odd-one-out.
And worse still he ended up marrying what was really his third choice rather than being alone as he went grey.
On Saturday I found myself buying ECCO shoes: comfy, orthopedic, ECCO shoes.... As a young lad I saw older teachers in ECCOs and thought to myself "That'll never be me! I'll never look like a grand-aunt shuffling around behind a zimmer-frame!" How wrong was I?!! I have stress fractures in my feet,[probably from trying to catch and pass a thirteen-year-old a few years ago at a Saint Stephen's day turkey burner race]... but the fact remains that I am now one of those old guys. I'm not Yeats or Will Shakespeare or Bob Frost but I'm feeling their pain.
Yesterday morning I fell off my bike on a piece of ice so small I've had more in a G+T. But my instant reaction was to get up, get going again and not to acknowledge the pain or embarrassment, not to admit to feeling it, not yet giving in to the obvious.