Old Stuff

Sinatra sang it, back in the day: . . . “and I look at my life as fine vintage, that flows, sweet and clear, from the brim to the dregs.” I mean, he was before my time, of my parents’ generation, the greatest generation. . . who put a stop to hitler and mussolini and hirohito. . . and all of that happened about six years before i was born. Now I’m the old guy, and these young people nowadays, they. . . I see them sitting on the Boston subway with their phones, looking at their phones. It was different, back in the day, when we boomers came along, sitting in the living room, watching Roy Rogers, Howdy Doody, and . . . well, whatever. That’s neither here nor there. But along the way, there were other things that happened. . . Simon and Garfunkel singing about old friends, who “sit on their park bench like bookends” and “a newspaper blown through the grass falls on the round toes, of the high shoes, of the old friends” Newspaper? what’s that? Now I’m the old guy, pecking away on this laptop, casting my fate to the wind. . . or, actually, the web, where the spiders of time will spin our snippets of this, that and the other into a tapestry of remembrance. . . do you remember when?. . . where were you, November 22, 1963? Where were you September 11, 2001? It seems that a tornado has lifted us into. . . “you’re not in Kansas any more, Dorothy!” You’re in 2025. It’s not hitler telling lies about the Sudetanland to Neville Chamberlain. . . it’s putin making up excuses about the Donbas, and trump thought he was a nice guy, and the fox has confiscated the vines of virtual veracity from MSNBC and where’s NBC anyway? Where’s Johnny Carson? He’s in the sweet by ’n by with Milton Berle and Walter Cronkite.

with Spencer Tracy and Kirk Douglas and Dorothy and scarecrow and tinman and Cecil B. Demille and way, way back there. . .at Ford’s theater, President Abraham Lincoln, and even further back than that. . . Abraham, who left Ur of the Chaldees, and even further back than that. . . there’s Eve in the garden. She’s talking to that suspicious character. He’s talking to her on her phone. And the rest is history. One day, some day, I’ll be on the other side of that great divide between life and death.

But I’m not worried; I will have a guide as I enter that new territory. He’s the one, y’all, who survived death after three days. I’m not making this up. It’s a stream of consciousness. It’s just that, at some point, the consciousness morphs into eternity. You believe that? If you do, I’ve got some real estate in heaven we’ll share with you. King of Soul