I am older than my father

That’s right. By quite a bit, actually.

   My father died at the age of 49. I am now 63 years old.  That makes me 14 years older. There is no way I can really imagine him older than he was when he died.

   I try to think of him as an old man, and the image of how he may have been doesn’t remain in consciousness for long. So, it is always feels like a contradiction to me.

Leonard Wright (1915-1965)

I must admit that I have never felt his army photos captured his real appearance or outlook.

   The main reason, I am sure, is that in his entire life, I cannot recall ever openly disobeying or defying him. I was 18 when he died, but had left home at 16 to go to Brisbane, so my obedience shouldn’t seem surprising to most people whose father never gave them a good reason to confront him.

   I know of many who defied their parents from an early age, and they would have had their reasons. But never can I recall either of my parents asking my sisters or me to do anything unreasonable or beyond us.

   There were, of course, plenty of times I didn’t want to do what was asked of me, but that’s par for the course with kids. While I think of it, I never in my life saw a lazy child, though I knew many who were called that. I have seen many unmotivated, often disrespectful and thoughtless kids, but they were the same ones who for hours, days, weeks! would do, with great energy, intensity and concentration, those things that did interest them. You can’t call them lazy.

   You and I are probably in that category too. We can usually find time to do what we really want to do, according to our priorities. There’s no such thing as ‘I don’t have time to do that’ (except maybe for mothers with young families!)  What we mean is, ‘I’m not prepared to make the time because other things are more important to me.’ Admit it. That’s life.

   As a child, it’s another matter to refuse, point blank, what a parent demands or requests (parents’ “requests” are usually demands, aren’t they, however sugar-coated?) You would have to be a much different sort of person to what I was to refuse that, and certainly the parent would have to be different from mine as well. Some people just radiate authority, and a youth of 16 in a secure family environment has no reason to challenge it.

   Yet, from 16 onwards, I made all my own decisions, effectively. I never had the opportunity to discuss anything with my father as one mature personality to another. It was never anything but an unequal relationship. Very Confucian, really. And pretty normal I should think.

    I didn’t think much about this in the years up to the time I approached the age he was at his death, even though we would have been poles apart by then in many ways. He learned his wisdom from the land, from my mother, his Army service during WWII, and from being the youngest in a family of seven girls and five boys. I believe his own father’s word was law, until his father died, aged about 70, I think.

   I never knew either of my grandfathers, who had both died before I was born. But my experience of the world at age 49 would have been unimaginably different from Dad’s.

   He had left school on 24 March 1929. How can I be so certain? Because that was his 14th birthday.* In those days it wasn’t unusual to leave school as soon as it was legal to do so. At that time, believe it or not, there were plenty of jobs, the country was awash with money, and there was no real reason for any boy who didn’t like sitting behind a desk to stay at school.

   But that, of course, was just months before October of 1929, when the Great Depression struck. A boy who left school earlier that year suddenly had to face the consequences of the greatest financial crisis the modern world had ever known thus far. If that struggle for the next decade didn’t provide an education, then nothing would…. I respected that.

   But how different to mine. Utterly. I try to imagine us sitting down, over a beer, both at age 49, trying to discuss things. I have no idea what we could have talked about. I can’t imagine what he would have made of me. All I know is that to me he would have still had the strong aura of authority he had when I last saw him in the dairy. 

Lyn just sent me this picture of Dad. He would not have been far off 49 when this was taken. Seeing it for the first time, I can hardly believe how young he looks, and how old I now feel!

I did sometimes amuse myself by thinking how I would try to explain my world at age 49, the year then being 1996, to him in a world that stopped in 1965. What would he have found most bizarre?

   And now I am much older than he was. Again, it seems very weird to imagine a conversation with him with that degree of age difference between us. I try to imagine, not very successfully, how he would have regarded me, now 14 years older than he, approaching the age of authority of his own father at the time my grandfather died.

   The worlds we inhabited would have been intersected only with family and the history we shared in my childhood. Would he have been appalled by what he would have regarded as radical and unimaginably wrong political and social views?

   Maybe not as much as I might think. He may not have been educated, by later standards, but I know he was intelligent and thoughtful.

   I think it is fortunate for you if you do not nor ever have become older than your parent(s); at least, comparatively early on in life. I’m glad in a way that I will never be older than my mother. It’s strange enough being a lot older than one parent, let alone two. 

   There’s wisdom in old age you only really understand when you start to get there yourself. Knowledge isn't wisdom. Wisdom is what you can do with knowledge, and that tends to come with time and experience of life more than anything else.

   For the price you pay to get there, you have to claim some advantages! There aren’t all that many….

* 24 March 1929 was a Sunday, I note, so I guess he left school on Friday 22 March!