the oldest man I know
John Beeman lives in the adjoining apartment and is reconciling himself to moving out with his wife of 71 years and into a 2 bed one bath by the river when all his life he and Rosemary have had the room to paint in their fully equipped studio.
He’s approaching 97, she’s 93. Their conversation is about creating. Their future is the loss of it.
I can hear him dismantling his studio through the shared wall. The slow and measured disassembling of a workshop of tools he has used for decades. Put away, Boxed up. Gone.
They came to lunch today: oysters, prawns, mango salad, French Champagne and we spoke about living in the country up here, the problems, the snakes and ticks, winds that rip off every leaf in the teak tree that overhangs the pool and floats them down onto the water’s surface all the windy day.
Thousands of descending leaves. Hundreds of times. Own a pool. Become a slave to cleaning it. This we both understood, John and I.
John is a WW2 veteran who served in the RAAF, now his eyes have failed him, he is miserably stooped and hard of hearing – yet when I tell him of the drowned critters I had to pull out my pool from time to time, like echidnas, rats, mice, snakes, lizards he laughed. Then told me about the bull that had to be removed from his pool when he had a property down Yamba way.
John’s pool was of saltwater and he figured the beast broke though the pool fence, dipped its snout into the salty water then overbalanced and tipped in.
Took a while to get him out, John said, which he eventually did then watched as the beast rumbled off wetly into the adjoining paddock.
The next morning.
Just by the fence.
The bull.
Surrounded by about a dozen cows all of whom were licking at the bull’s hide, the bull’s salt-covered hide .. all of it. Under and over.
Again and again.
Over and over.
How we laughed.
John Beeman is one of the very few surviving veterans of WW2 and to have him and his wife at my table today was something I hardly deserved.
I put it down to the oysters. They are their weaknesses.
petebowes.com 