A is for AGE

"Quel âge avez-vous?" asked my teacher. "J'ai douze ans," I replied. That may have been the first ever French phrase I uttered and certainly the only time I had to reveal my age in a foreign language. Age had dominated my life long before I was able to count up to twelve. During my first year, a variety of nurses and doctors had been sadistically plunging needles, initially into my soft bottom and then as my age rose and my tolerance level dropped, using my left arm as a pin cushion, all the while assuring my mum and yours truly that it was all for my own good, which it probably was. By the age of four, the daily rigours of a formal education in the sandpit had kicked in and through a progression of blocks, bricks, paintings, sums, words and nature rambles, I suddenly found myself at the age of eleven, to be kicked out again and told to go and join a big school. Well that's a rough paraphrase of what happened. Somewhere in the middle of this learning curve, at about age eight, I was overtaken by a fast travelling piano and, having climbed aboard at my mother's 'request', I was taken on a wild ride of torture for at least six years until I was old enough to jump off with only minimal injury to mum's plans. The landing was certainly softened by the fact that I had grabbed a guitar around the halfway point of my torment and mum saw a greater future for me accompanying my sister's singing on a six string wooden box.

Yet age continued to be predominant factor. Representing a school team required being under twelve, or under thirteen and by the time year fifteen arrived, it was the beginning of external exams. By sixteen, tractor driving was legal and a year later a faster set of four wheels was within reach. Still, nobody set an upper or lower age limit when it was OK to look at some of the young ladies who lived in another land,beyond the stone walls of our all boys' educational establishment. As I watch my own family grow up, age continues to be at the forefront of their lives and in this modern world, eighteenth and twenty-first birthdays are landmarks which seemed to pass with a lot less celebrations than they now demand. For many of us, those milestones beyond twenty one are viewed with much greater trepidation as we move into a new stage of life and watch those who follow, deal with the demands that age makes upon them in much the same manner as we did. I suppose halving clocked up a recent half century, it is comforting to hear countless referrals to fifty as the 'new forty' but if 'life begins at forty', I start to wonder what I did before then and what I've been doing since. And as I watch sporting stars discover that, sooner or later, skill is not enough to compensate for the march of time and remark that it is now a young person's world, I am quickly reminded that it always has been but that age also carries the bag of experience that youth is only beginning to fill.

And God, the Ageless One, who has been there from the beginning ,often used those, such as Abraham,Sarah,Jacob,Moses and Elizabeth, who were later in years, to do his work, a thought which encourages all of us to remember that with Him, there is no retirement age.

Returning to my introductory French, I have always been intrigued by the fact that the literal translation of my answer is in fact, "I HAVE twelve years.' A quick and very approximate calculation tells me that by the age of fifty, if we have managed to give God one hour every day for at least forty of those years, we have spent only about two years of our lives devoted to him. For many, I guess that would be an extremely generous estimate. Not much return for someone who gave his whole life for us! How many years have you? And how do your sums add up?