June 20 looms, and heralds a day of national significance in the busy, clamouring nationhood of my long life, a day that honks a horn and squeaks a balloon in celebration, a day like none before it but all that come after it, a day I feared would never happen and yet feared would happen, a day that comes with an official stamp of old age, a day that delivers pieces of gold, that lays a golden egg, that unwraps a very special birthday present in the shape of the Gold Card.
June 20 marks 65 years of not being dead yet. I have survived car crashes, volcanic eruptions, alcohol poisonings, occasional beatings and Greymouth. I fell off a balcony in the dead of night ‒ more alcohol poisoning ‒ and there was that time a heater set the house on fire while I was watching Good Luck Charlie with my daughter. Surgery didn’t kill me and I am known in certain circles as The Man They Couldn’t Hang.
Anyway, my reward is the Gold Card. The prospect of it is deeply moving. It feels like staggering across the finish line and being greeted by stirring music ‒not so much Chariots of Fire as Mobility Scooters of Fire ‒ and a standing ovation from the pension office. Government benevolence is a beautiful concept. It’s a kindness that does not discriminate. It merely asks for your age. It’s a kind of bouncer at the doorway of a dark, quiet and possibly boring club exclusively reserved for old people.
June 20 pays okay. I have rich friends who say things like, “It’s a bit of spare change.” But all money is good money, and I regard Gold Card money as a significant raise in income. Some boring people who have made approximately zero contribution to journalism threw me out of my job at the Herald a couple of months ago. The loss of income has been annoying and it reminded me of the trauma I used to experience in my impoverished 20s, when I would stare in at bakery windows and despair that I didn’t have enough money for a doughnut – the fear that my life would resemble the penniless journalist in Knut Hamsun’s classic novel Hunger, yearning for loaves of bread and sweet cakes in the shops of Kristiania, was great and profound. No need to worry any more. The pension is doughnut money.
June 20 is the beginning of the end. You can fool yourself in your 50s and early 60s that you have social value but not at 65. The Gold Card is a government certificate stating that the bearer of this document is of approximately zero consequence. It’s an extinction event. One of my best friends is 92; he’s in great spirits and generally excellent health; I ran into him at a literary function a few weeks ago and said to him that there were drinks upstairs, and he legged it up the two flights even quicker than I made it to the bar by taking the lift. But Karl has always been an exceptional person. I belong to the tired masses, with our average health and our average life expectancy. We are the great unnoticed.
June 20 beckons, a red-letter date on the calendar framed in a Gold Card. It feels good. It feels like I will have settled an account. To turn 65 is not an intimation of mortality thing. It’s a comfort thing, a soothing state-provided pillow thing. It’s a reward for having got this far, a nice hot cup of tea and a doughnut provided as a welcome to the slippered years, the hot-water bottle years, the years of preferably not living dangerously. It’s a passport to the country of old men and women. It’s a rite of NZ passage. It’s going to be a very good day of quite a few happy returns – it’s going to be a happy birthday.
