She loves me, she loves me not....

When I had the epiphany I call 'the sadness of aging' I was 19 years old and it was 11 o'clock in the morning.

I was on the 309 bus ( a single decker painted blue) travelling from Botany to Kensington. In was in the  mid seventies, in the days when people could still smoke on buses, the bus was crammed with grey and blue haired  people in their sixties and seventies, there was a blue and orange add on the wall that announced VD is Catchy! and there was a hand lettered sign behind the driver that said "Do not speak to the driver whilst bus is in motion.". 

As the bus chugged off from the bus stop and I took my seat I took a moment to examine my fellow travelers - the invisible people -  and realised how old and uninteresting they all were. 

As far as I was concerned, in my little 19 year old's head at least, the other people on the bus, as 'old' people,  weren't real people, they were just cardboard cutouts, just caricatures. 

The bus trip to uni was about forty minutes and often I would entertain myself by playing that game where you stare at the back of someone's head and try and get them to turn around by the mere power of your gaze (it works - just try it)....  And, on this particular day, during this game, my eyes fell on a particularly fine looking woman, in her seventies, with sculptured cheekbones and porcelain skin and clear blue eyes - and the light glanced upon her face in such a way that, for a moment, she metamorphed into a much younger person. 

In that moment of clarity I realised that she had once been young and beautiful. 

And when I looked back at the other people in the bus, I understood, that if I looked very hard, I could see the young people hidden in their faces, that I could see the archetypes of youth, that I could almost recognise the people that I had been to school with, as if every generation has it's facial types that emerged in groups every twenty or thirty years ....

I first heard the expression 'invisible person' a few years ago from some friends of mine in their seventies. I heard it again a few weeks ago while watching an English detective show set in an old persons' home - so I am guessing that, as an expression, it has become endemic.

Basically the expression relates to how people become 'invisible' as they get older. I think we have all experienced it in one way or the other.

Interestingly as people age they can be invisible in a few different ways. They can be invisible because people of the opposite sex no longer relate to them in a hormonal sense. They can be invisible to advertisers who perceive that older people have not available income to spend. But more importantly, they can be invisible because they no longer appear to have anything to offer society. 

For me I think I started entering the realm of the 'invisible' person about five years ago. It's hard to say really, because I seem to merge in and out of that realm on a daily basis. It's like there is flimsy wall there, not quite tactile, not quite translucent, that divides the two worlds that I stand in, and I can, with difficulty, step between one and the other, depending on what I am wearing, or whether I have had a hair cut, or whether I am in Paris, or my hair is blonde, or I am booking into an expensive flashy hotel, or walking through a shopping center dragging a plastic bag full of apples along the ground .....

So in a way, both these gentleman are me. They are almost brothers. Yet you can see that they have different characters. One is posing seriously for his photograph, the other refuses to take life lying down, to take anything seriously, in fact denies that he has become an invisible person, and in this denial, creates his own self fulfilling prophecy. I'll let you guess which is the real me.

So what's this have to do with Illustration Friday?

When I read the Illustration Friday prompt "Ferocious" my first thought was to do the lion tamer thing (i'm doing circus themed stuff still)... then I realised that "Ferocious" could be applied to so many things. 

It could be an adjective for friendship, it could be an adjective for a cat - and it could be used to describe the Norwegian Death's Head man-eating-butterfly that spends the daytime hours hiding in the damp underleaves of the Norwegian Oespaghous Bushe, only to emerge just on twilight to descend on unwary travelers and rip off their heads with one fell bite while said travelers are looking in the other direction.

Hence the butterflies :)