Winter is really upon us in this southern state and one of the worst things is that I run out of the summer fruit I enjoy on my cereal in the morning. I get blackberries from the local farm, rhubarb from my garden and strawberries from the supermarket. Of course, I freeze what I can but there is usually not much left by the middle of July. I finished the last of the raspberries yesterday and all I could find tn the freezer this morning was a solitary bag of blueberries which Nera and Jamie had picked a year or two ago. I'm not fond of blueberries. I think they have a nasty chemical taste but, if all else fails, I have to hold my nose and suffer it. Maybe I'll have to invest in a bag of frozen imported blackberries from the supermarket.
I found this story, Old Bill, which isn't dated (although I wrote it in 2022) and doesn't seem to have an ending - just a stream of consciousness. Doesn't matter!
OLD BILL
Old Bill was always up and about by 7 o’clock in the morning. He’d read about other old codgers who never stayed in bed after 6 but he thought 7 was a reasonable hour and it fitted in with the pattern he’d established in his working life. He had always worked what he called ‘office hours’, starting at around 9 and working until 5: ‘civilised hours’ he liked to say.
His father had worked as a mechanic and followed ‘tradesman’s hours’, maybe starting as early as 7 o’clock if he was on the dayshift, which meant he would get up around 5.30. When he retired, Bill’s Dad kept to the same pattern and used to say it was ‘against his religion’ to still be in bed after 6. Like many of his generation, Bill’s dad didn’t live long in retirement. He was gone before his 75th birthday and Bill used to say that he only lived long enough to spend his paltry retirement money and that didn’t take long.
It was different nowadays and people retired with pretty significant savings, all
due to the push by government to encourage superannuation. The pension wasn’t much but, so long as you had a house, you wouldn’t starve. Bill worried, of course, about those poor buggers who hadn’t managed to save enough for their retirement and hadn’t managed to buy a house for one reason or another. Their future, in rented accommodation, without a decent nest egg looked pretty bleak. He just hoped their health held up.
Bill couldn’t understand the people he had met who couldn’t wait to retire so they could get hold of their superannuation and lash out on expensive holidays, new cars and so on. He’d heard more than one superannuation millionaire say that the government could look after him when the money ran out. Bill and his wife didn’t stint but were careful not to spend too much on ‘frills’. One holiday a year is enough and there’s only so many times you can sit on a cruise ship watching the gulls fly by.
He often thought about his travels and the wonderful adventures he had had. He loved to drop the names of favourite places into conversations: When we were in Kathmandhu… Vladivostok was an interesting city … and his friends and family were tolerant of stories they had heard many times before. In his 80th year, he thought he was entitled to take up a bit of people’s time to chat about things that interested only him.
Bill found that he had too much time on his hands. He was never keen on the church and had resisted invitations to join the Bowls Club or the Men’s Shed so had to look for other ways to fil his time. Sheila, his wife, kept herself busy with reading and crosswords and she always seemed to be knitting something. Bill was unsure what, exactly, was being knitted and assumed the products were being passed on to one charity or another. There were no little children in the family any more to knit for so someone else’s children would be the beneficiaries, and Sheila seemed happiest when she had something to keep her hands busy.
Keeping busy made him think of his garden and how much harder it was becoming to find the energy to keep up with the weeding and the watering, apart from the thousands of other little jobs which kept springing up. He couldn’t imagine the day when he could no longer look after the garden adequately but he had no doubt that day was coming closer.
Was that Sheila calling him in for a cup of tea? His hearing had been a problem for years and was getting worse. His new hearing aids were supposed to be the latest model but he still couldn’t hear anything with them. Still, he didn’t have to pay for them and there was no problem with booking in for a check-up. He was sure Sheila always accepted the invitations to have the regular check-up because she enjoyed the chat and talking to someone different about their ailments. She always suggested that Bill was useless and a burden to her, but that was OK; if she wanted to let people know how hard she worked then that was fine, Bill knew he couldn’t do now what he could do years ago and it was better if he didn’t dwell on it. He knew he was the most fortunate man, to have a wife like Sheila who had stuck with him for over half a century.
Some of his mates complained that their wives became crabby and one even told her husband she had had a choice of men when she was young and only realised now that she had made the wrong decision in whom she should marry. Bill thought that was a terrible thing to say; she had made her bed, for better or worse, and she should lie in it.
There was a football match on the TV this afternoon; Rabbitohs v Sharks, apparently. He could understand why a team might call itself Sharks, or Bears or Jets, they suggest strength and power, but Rabbitohs or Swans? Might as well call yourself the Marshmallows or the All-Day Suckers. He started to chuckle at the thought but stopped himself in time. If Sheila heard him chuckle, she’d want to know what was so funny and wouldn’t let up until he thought of something innocuous to tell her. She wouldn’t get why the thought of sissy names for football teams tickled his fancy. That’s another saying you don’t hear nowadays: some people have dirty minds, he supposed.
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