No longer afraid to be 70… I thank you all

Segun Odegbami

It is the day after the day, after the day, after… I am still in a trance. I have been in a daze, unable to fully rationalise and comprehend the events of the past seven days in my life.  

It has been like a dream. I am waking up this morning finally to the reality that time has flown by… that my little attempt to quietly celebrate the anniversary of my birth date, has been a joke. 

Even when the calls started to rain from last Thursday night, I couldn’t, or wouldn’t get it fully into my head that I am actually becoming ‘old’, like my late father when I visited him in Gombe at 17.

He was a warehouse manager at the British Cotton Growing Association, BCGA, at the time. 

During one of our conversations, he told me his age – 57. Fifty what? 

I looked at him in amazement. How could anybody be that old, least of all, my father? It would take an eternity to get to such an ‘old’ age, I reasoned. 

That ‘eternity’ has come and gone in a flash. One morning a few years ago, I walked into my office in Yaba, Lagos and my workers were organising a small ceremony to mark my 50th birthday.  

Impossible! 50? When did it happen?

I was already 50, old like my family? 

How did it happen? Where did the years vaporise into in my life? 

I have not fully resolved that in my mind for years, and suddenly here comes ‘70’ sneaking in on me like a thief in the dark. You mean another 20 years have sped past since that day in my office in 2002? 

I cannot feel the weight of such an old age on this body, nor the pressure on this mind. But the reality dawns.

My consolation is a realisation that ‘Age,’ for me, has been but a harmless number and a beautiful reminder of the eternal ‘tick tock’ doing its thing, whilst I am doing mine. Neither of us