Solo Performance

On Monday this week I had occasion to visit Christine, who has been an acquaintance through our church connections for many years.  As we sat in her lounge, I was quite surprised by the depth of our conversation.  Now 75, she and her husband either had just celebrated or were looking forward to - to my shame, I can't recall which - their 47th wedding anniversary.

She referred to one of her bridesmaids, now living in the far north of Scotland, who was unable to attend their celebrations.  They had shared a room at boarding school.  Her friend was a couple of years older and the school's policy was to pair girls up in that way so that new pupils could find their way.  Christine said, "She was like a sister to me.  I should have loved to have a sister ... but it just wasn't to be."  Since I, too, was an only child, our conversation then explored this common factor a bit more.

The following day, I had been expecting another friend to visit me, but this had been called off, so instead of driving to the post office, I had ample time to walk.  Now, I live in the industrial part of the Garden City, which is no longer solely industrial as was originally planned in the early twentieth century.  This does mean, however, that the sight of heavy lorries on our nearby roads is quite commonplace, and a couple passed me as I walked along.

Inevitably, my thoughts went back to days before my retirement, to the times when I needed to park my tiny van next to a 40-tonne artic. at a busy distribution centre and queue with those elites of the driving world, waiting for instructions or for a delivery to be completed.  Conversation on these occasions would reveal something of their lives.  They worked on a larger scale, of course, but underneath were lives very similar to my own.

The life of a lorry driver, just as that of a same-day courier as I had been, is not for everyone.  In many ways family life, if there is any, has to submit to a different one as part of a team, but a team of people whom you might see the next day, or not for two or three weeks.  You might speak in the crew room of something happening that evening or at the weekend, and the next time you meet it would be, "how did so-and-so go?" by which time the whole event has passed into history.

I recalled the previous day's conversation when we had spoken of how being an only child had taught each of us to cope with life alone, whether on an odd occasion or for longer periods.  Christine had asked me, "how long have you been on your own?" and I had replied "for most of my life really."  I had told someone a couple of weeks ago that, in real terms, my family these days is the church and the bell-ringers.  While this is true, I'm beginning to realise that it's less real than I'd thought, for I meet with those folks only once or twice a week for a limited period, so that 'family' is no more so than those fellow drivers of a few years ago.

I said 'beginning to realise'; this realisation is partly a consequence of another friendship, one aspect of which was the expected visit I referred to earlier, that had been called off.  That message - so clear and irrefutable - was, I later realised, similar to many I've received down the years: 'a cold ... keeping my germs to myself.'  I had got used to passing off such messages as excuses when people just didn't want to bother with me.  This time such a thought never entered my head.

A day or so later, I made enquiries as to the progress of the cold.  After the update came another warming comment.  It said, "thank you for checking ... it's nice to feel ... that the thought is genuine."  It told me that I was being trusted; it was the reciprocal of my earlier observation about trusting other people.

Trust like that is only really found in a family; it's something that had become foreign to me.  That said, in recent years, I've gradually learned a lot about trust: trust when a well-paid job ends; trust when a financial crisis has a dramatic and almost overnight detrimental effect on weekly earnings; trust when age and circumstances mean that life has to take a whole new direction.  I'm pleased to realise that this stage-by-stage learning process is still moving on.