Monday 4 September 2006

Pic of the day: A plum tree in the garden. I was kindly allowed to eat them, but I don't like plums anymore. I ate them as a kid but they speed up my digestion too much now. Also they don't taste all that good anymore. Actually it was one particular tree I like to eat from when I was a kid, which had large pale juicy sweet plums. The blue plums which rule in our age have never really appealed to me.

Age and agelessness

When I moved in here around February 1, a very hasty process as some of you may remember, the grandmother of the house owner was helping his mother to make the place ready. She is around 80 years old but was surprisingly active. Until recently she would bike up here and tend the garden. It has always been her garden, I think... the house belonged to her late husband and her before she sold it to her grandson. I am certainly pleased that someone else maintains the flowers and bushes; I do not have a green thumb, nor any interest in it.

Lately she has had some trouble with her foot and cannot come and go at will, though her daughter will drive her when necessary, such as to harvest the plums I have neglected to eat. It is still rather impressive how she has stood up to time. There was even a mention of it in a local newspaper, which had a couple pages devoted to the house owner. He just this summer defended his doctorate thesis in Tromsø, and his grandmother was in the audience. This is evidently highly unusual. In part this is because of her, of course, but it also helps that he has moved very quickly in his academic career.

The truth is that he looks even younger than that. He could totally pass for an ordinary college student. But then again, some people just get young looks for free. I should know. I thought I was one of them.

***

When I was in my 20es, I was still asked whether to pay adult or child fare on the bus, so I put on the moustache that has become a sort of trademark for me later. This stopped it. I don't need that now, really. Around the age of 40, I changed from looking younger than I was, to looking older. This should not have surprised me, since I must have gotten the young-looking genes from my father. In my youth, he was sometimes mistaken for being one of us brothers, something he solved by growing a large beard. But it is a known fact that in mammals at least, genes from the father dominate early in life while maternal genes grow stronger over time. This is a natural side effect of the fact that the placenta is created by paternal genes more or less alone.

Think of pregnancy as a contest between the fetus and the mother for her valuable resources. If the fetus gets too little, it dies. If it takes too much, she is reduced and may be unable to survive or at least care for the child after it is born. None of these is good for the survival of the genes. But the genes come partly from the father, who is contributing nothing else. Well, not necesasarily contributing anything; this can vary. But not in the same immediate way. But he still has a very strong interest in passing on his genes. Thus the placenta. Since a placenta would be kinda pointless in old age, it is essential that paternal genes get activated first. The balance then gradually changes over a lifetime, so in old age we tend to be more like our mother's family than when we were younger.

Unlike me, some people actually get to look young for much of their life. Of course, modern living conditions help people stay young longer, but some people still stand out. One of these days I took the commute bus to town, and noticed the driver. I remember him from when I first moved to Søgne, 22-23 years ago. He looked the same now. I probably look old enough to be his father now.

And of course there is Ageless Girl at the office. She actually looks older than when she started, but I think much of it is in her hairstyle. People like these would have made me suspect that we actually had aliens among us, cleverly disguised as humans (like in my Kami fiction this summer). Well, except I've seen it in my own father, so that makes me less prone to conspiracy.

Actually I think it would be kinda cool if aliens or angels or some such lived among us and nobody knew. That's why I write fiction about it, of course. I like to write about cool things. Actually I would prefer if other people wrote about it and I could just read it. Like The boat of a million years by Poul Anderson. I enjoyed it greatly. Or Al Schroeder's short fiction about the Millennium Man. Or the legend of the Wandering Jew, at least when not made overtly anti-Semitic. If any of you can recommend any such literature, I am certainly willing to buy.

Even though it no longer applies to me.