It was during the Pandemic that Gary began to be aware of his mortality.

He was in his middle fifties, not really that old, late middle age possibly, not yet elderly , but then again, not exactly in the first flush of youth.

Approaching the ‘Twilight Zone ‘ of life, and the realisation that he was no longer one of the generation who drove the world, not in his workplace anyway, there he tended just to do what was asked of him, and occasionally a wee bit more, his days of putting his work first were long gone.

He just kept quiet and got on with it, just like his folks and their folks before him, and folk of his background had done for years before.

His ability to become invisible in the workplace was amazing, he just got on with his work below the radar, and never bothered anyone, and mostly nobody bothered him.

During the time of the first lockdown in 2020, he had gone walking as many people had, and become more aware of what was around him, the shoots of nascent plants sprouting from the earth, the birds singing in the summer mornings , the smiles of people who politely let him pass and practise social distancing.

Walking in the park , he realised that he remembered when the trees at the edge of the place were planted, way back in the ’70s , about the time that punk rock was at its height and when Elvis died, bloody hell, that was ages ago!. He and his pals had used the sapling trees as goalposts when they played football, and hung their jackets on the chicken wire that encased those saplings, it just seemed like yesterday.

People were like plants and trees really , just like the words of the hymn he recalled from his youth as a choirboy, ‘We blossom and flourish, as leaves on the tree , and wither and perish, but naught changeth Thee’.

His blossoming and flourishing had come and gone, a good few years back.  

He could see himself getting older when he looked in the mirror each morning, the greying at the temples, the receding hairline, and his salt and pepper beard made him look increasingly like his late Dad. Nobody could turn back time, could they?. He laughed to himself when thinking of the song from the ‘80s by Cher, ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’, even she couldn’t do that , though cosmetic surgery may have assisted her!

He walked past the park every afternoon, and each day noticed something new, the snowdrops were coming through the soil, and crocuses were starting to spring from the earth, then daffodils would follow , new life in a new year, or he supposed, a new season, as winter moved into spring, after the long winter months had finally dissolved into March, which this year came in like a lamb.

Gary was aware of the saying that March ‘comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion’ or vice versa, from his Granda talking about that back in the ‘70s.

Gary had remembered all these sayings Granda had told him, about the weather and the seasons, he would weave them into a short story or a poem one of these days, he recalled the one about St Swithin’s Day, the 15^th July. He recalled sitting with his grandparents beside the River Dee on a beautiful sunny summer day, (were the summers really brighter in the ’70s, or was that just a sign of getting older?) and Granda had told him ‘St Swithin’s Day , if thou be fair, for forty days t’will rain nae mair,  Gary couldn’t remember the rest of it, so thought he would Google it later. These sayings all harked back to a time when old folk could tell what the weather was going to be by looking at the sky, having an awareness of what was going on around them,  or at least that was how it seemed. Folk didn’t depend on checking these things on I-Phones or the like, in very different times. In the ‘old days’, folk were more reliant on knowledge, on experience, rather than a simple clicking on a link to a website as they did in the 21^st Century. 

This was how it was , being human in the ever changing world  in which we live. Gary recalled his Grandma say the same things his Mum now said,  the same catchphrases resounding down the decades, maybe Gary himself sounded like his Dad with inherited catchphrases and character traits, he had no children , so wasn’t aware if he did or didn’t sound like his Dad had. If he did , did it really matter, that was part of getting older wasn’t it, becoming to look or sound like your father?

It was just before the O’Grades in 1979, and a Holiday Monday, Easter Monday to be exact, a public holiday, a day off school to do nothing, to forget all the studying for a while. 

Gary and his pals Stevie and Ewan had decided to take a bus trip into town to Union Street, Aberdeen’s famous ‘Granite Mile’, the city’s main street, and have a look around, maybe smoke a few cigarettes on the upper deck of the bus and attempt to be cool, chat up some lassies on the bus, you never knew, did you? 

They were hanging about outside the Atholl Hotel waiting for the Number 18 bus. 

Gary wore his ex-army combat jacket bought from MacKay’s of Queen Street, which had been a real bargain at a fiver, it was cheap, but it looked surprisingly good, or so he thought. 

He had pinned a Rush badge onto it, a big tin badge with a picture of the band’s guitarist Alex Lifeson emblazoned on it. Gary thought it was cool, though he had not really heard much of their music,he reckoned that folk would assume he was a big fan. 

They had stocked up on cigarettes from the shop round the corner from their old primary school, which was known locally as the ‘Purple Shop. It was local rumour that they sold single cigarettes to schoolkids who looked of an age to be smoking, but they were too cool for that.

Stevie was the big smoker, he had his lighter, lighter fuel, and several packs of Marlboros with him, one in each pocket of his Wrangler jacket, which he would tap out to us on the bus, once we were up and running. 

His bleached Wrangler, done in the bath at home to his Mum’s horror, was now whiter than blue, but the multitude of heavy metal band patches more than compensated for that. They professed his fandom of Rush, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motorhead, and Saxon all of which he had crudely sewn on in large uneven stitches.  

Ewan had on his shiny new biker leather, which he had taken a fair bit of flak for, the reason being his lack of a motorcycle, though he said he was said to be saving up for one, with the money from his job in the butcher’s shop on Midstocket Road.  

Ewan’s money tended to go on albums, and like Gary and Stevie , he was a big heavy metal fan. AC/DC were his favourite band this week, he was always on about Bon Scott, their singer who had been born in Scotland, Kirriemuir to be exact, which was somewhere south of Aberdeen. Ewan banged on about AC/DC, and liked their ‘early stuff’, it was always cool to like the ‘early stuff’ of any given band, as it apparently made folk think that you might possibly have been cool enough to have heard of this band before they were popular, and that had to stand for something or at least it did to them. 

Gary for his part, liked their ‘Powerage’ album, and had heard it a lot at home when his brother Neil had played it to death on his Grundig cassette player, that was until the batteries ran out.

The number 18 drew up to the bus stop with a squeal of the brakes and they all got on board, paid their fares, and legged it upstairs, they were the only folk there, and it was a public holiday, so there would be few folk bothering them.  

Stevie tore open the pack of Marlboros bought from the American Foodstore, Marlboro’s were from the States, and you only got them at a few shops in Aberdeen, so Stevie , ever the cool guy, in his eyes, was first to get and smoke them. He passed them around, they all lit up, or ‘sparked up’ as some folk said, Gary coughed a bit, as he wasn’t used to it. He had seen his Gran smoking, and she had a racking cough all the time. He did not want to get a ‘smoker’s cough’, but maybe he would try it today, as the others were, it was a holiday Monday after all.  You did not want to the odd one out, did you, it was probably better to follow the crowd, especially when they were your mates. Gary inhaled deeply once, and felt a bit dizzy for a moment, then it was fine, if you took it slow and steady, you would be ok, that was it, the trick was to keep breathing, like in Life itself. 

Although Stevie had no part time job, he seemed to have access to a seemingly endless supply of money. Folk at school said that he nicked from his folks, from his Ma’s purse, but that was never something that had been proved. Maybe he just had heaps of money, was loaded, minted whatever, some folk were, some weren’t. He once went out on a Saturday afternoon, on a spending spree, returning home with umpteen albums, a pair of cowboy boots, and a cigarette rolling machine, and several packs of cigarette papers. He smoked out his bedroom window, so his Ma wouldn’t find out he was a smoker, as if she didn’t know already.

He had been seen smoking in the street by his Mum’s boss, and his Mum had not spoken to him about it but would soon. Stevie didn’t care, he wanted to be left school once the O’ Grades were done, get a job working in a shop or something, stacking shelves in Fine Fare or something, if he could keep himself in heavy metal albums, and of course cigarettes.  

Ewan, apart from banging on about his records, was always going on about doing his Highers in 5^th year and applying to university and getting out of Aberdeen for once and for all.  

 Gary did not know what he wanted to do with his life, he had gone to a careers fair at the school hall, and there was nothing there that he fancied, he had wanted to be in a band, but that was never going to happen, maybe he would end up like his dad and grandad before him, office clerks, drudging away with paperwork and time constraints until he finally retired, or expired. It was a depressing thought to have for someone whose life had barely started. He looked out the window of the bus, into the street below, seagulls flapped around outside St Nicholas Kirk, and the granite gleamed in the sun although it was only April. He decided at that point, that he would set his sights on becoming a writer, whatever you had to do to achieve that aim. He would write stories of local  folk as people like Lewis Grassic Gibbon before him had done, ordinary folk like him living their lives out in this part of Scotland.  

His reverie was brought to a halt by an abrupt shout ‘Oi, Shand, you nae finished your fag yet’, said Ewan, they were about to get off the bus, outside the kirkyard. They clattered down the stairs of the bus, leaving the bus driver gazing on aghast as these three lads, clearly too young to smoke, exited his vehicle.