Tony DeyalLAST SATURDAY was my birthday. Late Friday night, at midnight when my birthday struck, I was busy completing a presentation for the Annual Meeting of the Caribbean Nurses Organisation in St. Kitts. Would they appreciate the joke about the absent-minded nurse who when asked to prick a boil on a sick man got it completely mixed-up and made the poor man even more ill? Or, would they bandage my mouth shut after pouring Dettol down my throat? Then it hit me that I was one year older and might need my own nurse soon.
GETTING OVER THE HILL
When do you know the exact point at which you're over the hill? In some ways I am already on the downside, in the lee of whatever prominence or promontory that life constructs, constitutes or consists of. For instance, I am smart enough to know better and old enough not to care too much about what other people think of me. I am finally old enough to know the rules and smart enough to break them. I am getting to the point where a night out requires a day in.
However, I am not yet at the stage where most of the names in my little black book are doctors. I love the younger generation and don't believe that there is nothing wrong with them that 20 years won't cure. Whatever the season, whether spring is in the air or not, there is still a spring in my step. I figure the point will come when my teeth and I don't sleep together, it takes two tries to get up from the couch, and when I try to straighten out the wrinkles in my socks I discover that I am not wearing any.
That is the point where I will know for sure that I am over the hill. Further proof will come when I am at the breakfast table and hear snap, crackle and pop even though I am not eating cereal, when I am on vacation and my energy runs out before my money does, and when I can live without sex but not without my glasses.
Indranie, my wife, came into the room to wish me "Happy Birthday". I did not try holding in, or even pulling in, my stomach. That is a bad sign for older men. It means you're already over-the-hill and moving rapidly downwards. Next thing you know they'll ask you to check your bags at the airport and you are not accompanied by either luggage or older ladies.
What with one thing and another, I went to bed almost immediately after but to sleep much later. Groucho Marx once said that a man is as old as the woman he feels. In my case, I am praying that his dictum is valid and mine remains so for a while.
The rest of the day was all downhill. I was booked on Caribbean Star. Small propeller plane or what the late George Chambers called, 'Shake and Bake'. It was late. I put my luggage through the security check and walked through the arch without a beep. Then the Trinidad Airports Authority Security man looked at me with a grin, commanding me to spread. I had a headmaster who repeatedly repeated another dictum that he who does not hear must feel. Well, this security guard must have been stone deaf. He felt me all over, dictum, rectum and all, using his hands and busy little fingers. I figured that he must have failed the Prison Officers' examination, or must have been kicked out of the Roman Catholic Seminary.
INDIGNITY
Trinidad continues to be the only place where travellers are subject to this kind of indignity without cause or reason. In other Caribbean countries, even where there is evidence of serious attempts to smuggle narcotics, like Barbados and Jamaica, airport security uses hand-held electronic detectors. Not Piarco. The head of security once tried to justify this practice to me (when I had been frisked early one morning by a woman just as unattractive as the male guard) by saying this is how they catch people who try to smuggle stuff out. They are foolish smugglers indeed, unless they are so high on something that they giggle or respond to the overtures of the guards, promising them some substance in return for the abuse.
This was just the beginning. The plane landed in Grenada, St. Vincent and then St. Lucia. There was no air-conditioning while we remained on the ground, and the air in-flight was not much colder. I had decided not to buy any water, believing that I would get some on the flight. We were told that because each of the stops was less than 25 minutes, we would have to wait until the St. Lucia-Dominica leg for any liquid refreshment.
After we left St. Lucia, and almost two hours after we had departed from Trinidad, the stewardess brought out a bottle of water and some juice. On the Dominica-Antigua leg, there was no more water. As I stepped off the plane in Antigua in transit to St. Kitts, I noticed a sign on a mound of mixed vegetation next to the cracked, concrete sidewalk that led to the Arrivals area. It commanded, "Keep Off the Grass" and threatened a $200 fine. I was uncertain what the sign meant. Some bits of indeterminate green growth had already infiltrated the numerous holes in the pavement and were hard to avoid. However, knowing Antigua, I felt perhaps that the grass referred to was not the one that protruded from the cracks but the one that preceded crack in the history of Caribbean drug usage.
Given that the same airport was the scene of the arrest of the brother of the present Prime Minister for possession of cocaine (for which he was fined), I thought that fining people to keep off the grass would be useful if you wanted them on some other substance that may or may not be crack-filled. In any case, given the abrupt disappearance of the funds for health insurance in Antigua, keeping people off the grass would be a good idea if you wished to reduce claims caused by hay fever and other allergic reactions.
Thirsty, I ordered Coke from the concessionaire in the terminal. Not to be misunderstood, I emphasised, Diet Coke. It cost me US$2 or TT$12 for a cup loaded with ice and a short squirt (not the bartender but the coke). It was then that I realised that flying with Caribbean Star or living in Antigua was for the birds or Birds as the case may be.
I once made a joke, in the days when harass was two words instead of one, to a friend named Gail about what I wanted for my birthday. Jokingly, I said, "A sweet little song bird. A-night-in-Gail." She responded immediately, "What you really want is a night-in-jail!" The gods are not crazy. They heard her and added their own punishment. A shake-and-bake flight with a stopover in Antigua. A bird day instead of a birth day.
Tony Deyal was last seen saying that you know you're over the hill when you find his jokes about ageing both tasteless and insensitive.
