My grandfather, Desmond "Roy" Nail, was a semi-professional footballer who played for St Blazey and Plymouth Argyle in various South-West England post-war leagues. He died aged 52.
Several decades later my uncle died, also 52. Two years earlier my own mother had passed away at the exact same age.
Each had their own particular vice: alcohol, tobacco, lard. Unhidden weaknesses, but inflated to main stage prominence upon this final act.
Selfishly, I've at times viewed this purely coincidental pattern exclusively with a competitive eye, sparing the genetic flaws against my own free will. Measuring my own life decisions against hypothetical scenes starring those handpicked from my family tree. And then patting myself on the back after minor personal successes, as if I was defying some sort of genetically inherited curse.
Ironically, it's a pessimistic perspective owed, at least in part, to my mother's own contradictory belief system - borrowed equally from religion and science. She would talk at length about the unfathomable wonders of heredity, in awe of its traceable logic, whereby recessive human traits are forced into extinction by dominant opponents, while equally valued attributes fight in a mathematical battle of probability. She'd also been raised under a strict Roman Catholic doctrine, empowered by its misguided master plan of "whatever will be will be" and a deeply held belief that an all-controlling Man In The Sky was gifted with the ability to override any proven human discovery.
With a weakness for dramatic consequence, I've welcomed the burden of both sides - defined by inescapable genes and punished for an eternity by the resulting actions.
52.
Deadlines. That squad of project managers have already scheduled those top floor meetings, editors have archaic real estate to fill and armed with those powerful binoculars we can just make out that distant border between an understandable existence and one our tiny minds will never be able to comprehend.
Taken as an inflexible - however, arbitrary - endpoint, deadlines are intended purely as motivational devices. There's nothing on that other side. Whatever happens between here and there is all that counts.
Between here and there.
Here there's temptations, an inescapable, genetic disposition. An instinctual feeling that some impulses are worthy of all unkind consequences.
But here there's also kilometres. A quiet night, early morning. Leichhardt to Beverly Hills. Stanmore to Sutherland. Woronora Cemetery to be precise. And just like that parable - maybe from the Old Testament - of two boys swimming out into the ocean and back, testing each other's willpower and endurance: "don't save anything for the trip back". You'll make it. You always make it. Let your mind wander away and those calf muscles - earned from countless, similarly punishing teenage treks up Old Ferry Road - take the load from here.
52.
It's barely at the point where assholes buy sports cars, fuck trophies and search for justification within the 'crisis' chapter of their new-age guides. It's a fair distance from superannuation payouts and grandchildren. Before your own children transition from subordinates to stakeholders to custodians. Before any of their notable achievements, their first crowning moments. Long before the point of reconciliation or understanding of everything that was done. For them. By you.
52.
It's hardly out of the blocks. It's thirty years short of the age proudly proclaimed by that guy at the starting line of every marathon. Bill Bailey, Phil Bailey, Grant Denyer, the white-toothed, cookie-cut cunt privileged with hosting such a mediocre media moment, passing time by questioning the guy that has done this 100 times already. "What’ll be different this time?".
52.
What'll be different this time?
—
Previously: Part One