Steve Braunias: A birthday lunch at a Papakura’s Stampede Steakhouse

Steve Braunias headed to Papakura train station for the express purpose of having a birthday lunch. Photo Michael Craig

OPINION

Another year older, and I took the train to Papakura. I always celebrate my birthday in style. But one of the first things I felt on Tuesday morning was a sense of shame. It felt wrong to have become this old. The numbers don’t add up - well, they do, a great many of them in fact, but the digits look off, like a bad sum. Biology is destiny - the way we look, the competence of the body - but as soon as you draw breath, you become a measurement of time, and your existence becomes a matter of mathematics. To get old is to find yourself inside a complicated equation.

Another year older, and I caught the 11.16am on platform one at Britomart. The place was deserted - a birthday on a ghost train. But I don’t think of it as old old age; I think of it as early old age. Early old age is a great age. It’s vigorous, alert, ready to work; but it’s also on good terms with peace. The race is nearly done. You’ve done your worst. My waking days have a constant background hum of regret, a static of all the hurt and sorrow that I’ve caused, but at the end of the day it’s night time and at night time I sleep like a log. Early old age is a narcotic.

Another year older, and the Southern Line runs straight through the middle of the isthmus. Auckland opens up like a flower made up of rust and steel, hard work and hard surfaces. I love watching the railyards of Ōtāhuhu, with the flat shield of the harbour beyond the mangroves - I love the Auckland isthmus. The best is yet to come in early old age. A promise is about to be delivered. It shines ever closer, shimmers like heatwaves above railway tracks; it’s waiting to be plucked off the vine, and taken everywhere you go. I am so close to receiving the gold dream of the Gold Card.

Another year older, and I keep seeing blossoms of a noxious weed alongside the railway tracks - the dear old castor oil plant, Ricinus communis. It’s poisonous. It’s banned. “You must not plant castor oil plant within the Auckland area … You must destroy any castor oil plant on land that you occupy.” I want one. It looks so great, a symphony of deep purple, its leaves serrated like a cannabis plant. “Gosh,” she texts, at the statistic of my age. “You getting up there.” I suppose it’s one step closer to the exit. But this is pessimistic. There is more than death to look forward to - there are physical infirmities and mental collapses, the threat of dementia, and just a general sort of uselessness. And then: “Happy birthday I love you xxx.”

Another year older, and I got off the train at Manurewa just for the happiness of wandering around Southmall and buying a Lotto ticket. I love Southmall. It’s a zone of terrible deprivation and I never can keep count of the $2 shops, but it has a sense of pride, courage, dignity. These are values to aspire to. I think of the future, of the years of the Gold Card and beyond, as a long sleep. Making ends meet, pottering around the house, watering a castor oil plant, nothing exacting or turbulent; a regime of early to bed and late to rise. Old old age could be even better than early old age.

Another year older, and I got back on the train and arrived at Papakura for the express purpose of having a birthday lunch at that thing of wonder surrounded by cacti, and festooned inside with bison heads and cowboy whatnot: the Stampede Steakhouse. I ordered a 200g sirloin (well done) with chips and two fried eggs. God, it was good. It felt like my life had arrived at this point: a life of hurts and sorrows, a life also of adorations and pleasures, of parents long since dead and a teenage daughter kind and beautiful, onboard a train of 63 years blundering through New Zealand, most of it in the railyards of work, stopping in on Tuesday, June 20, for a really good steak lunch in Papakura with long shadows on the Bombay Hills in the near distance.