Who knows where the time goes?

In the small Flemish town of Poperinge yesterday they were having a Hops Festival. I was in town visiting Talbot House as part of a battlefields tour including Tyne Cot Cemetery, just one of many memorials in that area to a generation of boys and men slaughtered for ... what?

I'm standing there drinking a very hoppy beer when a man approaches and asks if he may take my picture. Surprised, I agree. He asks for my email address and moves on. Later I see him again, he snaps me again and explains he's studying photography at the academy in Bruges, and this is for a project called "Strangers Passing".

The same evening the two photos landed in my mailbox. God, I'm an old guy. I can no longer look at pictures of myself, because the naked reality they contain is just too much in conflict with my whole view of the world. I'm not the person you see when you look at me, and it horrifies me that you could make such a terrible mistake.

I have a friend who's 62, and I consider him an old man, but the difference between us is less than half the years that separate me -- in the other direction -- from Zoltan, my Hungarian friend I visited last week. He's more like my contemporary, except in actual fact.

Last Sunday, as I flew home from Budapest, would have been Daniel's birthday, September 11. He would have been 35, a fact that's simply too unlikely to contemplate. As it turns out, he never made it to 35, and never will. As the ceremony reminded us later at Ieper, and as it does every evening: 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.

Above the square in Poperinge, the birds swooped and wheeled. Autumn is arrived, the season for old men. But a life is not a cycle; it is a wheel that turns in only one direction.

The birds are evoked in the first line of this song by Sandy Denny, who dies aged only 23. There are many versions her singing her own song on YouTube, but as I said in a post on Both Sides Now, the words better suit an older voice.

Update: my brother called this evening. My mother died this afternoon, no immediate COD. Autumn turns to winter in the space of a few hours. I put off going home when I should have. Then one day, the last opportunity is lost.