At a Certain Age

 

When I was younger, I watched it happen from afar.

My grandmother was an expert at it, but I dismissed it as ‘my grandmother was always like that’.

After a conversation with my favourite aunt, I gained a different perspective.

“She wasn’t always like that. As a young woman, she let people walk all over her, especially your grandfather.”

My grandfather died when I was young. I remember the aromas in the church. When I got a lot older, someone put a name to it — frankincense. There was furniture polish and shoe polish and dust as well. I remember thinking they should have dusted my grandfather before burying him. Kids form thoughts based on the available evidence. Dust is a recurring memory from childhood; I guess it’s because I was so close to the ground.

I doubt that science has defined it down to the month or the week, but somewhere in there, people, women, in particular, develop a sort of superpower.

I’m only guessing, and correct me if you think I’m wrong, but it seems that people worry about what people think of them more than anything else and then one day they don’t anymore — well, not as much anyway.

I watched one of my aunties wade into a melee of grown men who were angry after a junior basketball game. The parents were berating a young referee after a close finish. The young referee was my cousin, and it looked like he’d done a good job. Mind you, I would have called that last foul a charge rather than a block.

My aunty stood a few inches short of five feet tall, and she stood between the six-foot-plus fathers giving my cousin a hard time. She told them off for being childish, and eventually, they started to back away. Not content with this, she followed them to the exit door and saw them on their way. There were quite a few smiling faces in the crowd that dispersed at the end of the game.

I expected my aunty to rub her hands together, but she didn’t. Victory was hers, and she was gracious in victory.

“Arseholes,” she said before gathering up her knitting, congratulating my cousin on ‘a job well done’ and telling him she would see him when he got home after his shift. I followed her to her car because I expected the large fathers to be waiting for her in the carpark.

“Aren’t you going to stay and watch your cousin referee his next game?” she said when she noticed me trailing along behind her.

“Yeah, but I thought I’d keep an eye on you aunty. Those blokes were pretty angry.”

My aunt laughed.

“All talk, no trousers,” she said.

Not a flicker of fear.

I wondered if I would grow up to size up people that well.

I’m not sure I have, but I can pick a ‘no trousers’ without too much trouble.

On one occasion, she got slapped by a parent when she was coaching a junior team. One of the dads sorted the bloke out, but I expected it to put my aunty off coaching. It didn’t. She saw the incident as a blip.

“Most people aren’t like that. Did you see the parents jump up and deal with the slapper?”

She only coached a few games but went undefeated in her short career. The kids loved her. Most of them were taller than she was, but they listened to her because she had gravitas — that hard to define something that makes people want to follow someone.

Chances are that she probably always had that ability, but somewhere along the way, a light went on, and she became the person she was meant to be.

Mysterious creatures, humans.

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