“No wise man ever wished to be younger.”
- Jonathan Swift
Today marks a year since I stated writing this blog, or as a cousin up north calls it, my “blob.” I think I've missed three days, so 362 posts about everything and nothing. It's a self-serving exercise. I do them for the discipline they provide. They force me to concentrate and use my noggin consistently and I enjoy that. For anyone who's read or joined in along the way, I sure appreciate it. I like to bat ideas around with others so any discussion they've generated has been fun for me.
My thanks goes to Kendra for her willingness to edit. If you think some of the post are a little wonky, believe me, you wouldn't want to see the initial drafts. Also, thanks to Jeff Pickett for the heading artwork he provides.
Anyway, I'm gonna keep on keeping on until I run out of things to talk about. When will that be? Probably about when Keith Richards departs this realm, which is to say, no time soon.
And speaking of time, here's a thing: Getting older is strange. I seem to always be doing some crazy math in my head nowadays. For instance, recently I realized that I've been out of undergraduate school for 40 years. I figured up that when I was there in 1985, it had been 40 years since the end of WWII. But if you'd have asked me in 1985 how long ago was WWII, I would have said a long, long time ago; a distant history. But 1985 doesn't seem all that distant to me now.
I often plug in what my parents' ages were at given points in my life. How old were they in such and such a year? When you're young, parents don't have ages, they're just… parents. What kid ever thought about their parents ages, and even if they did, what reference point would they have? But thinking about it now, in that year,1985, my dad was my current age. Can that be right? He seemed a lot older to me then than I think of myself now. It's all a little unsettling.
What got me thinking about this was a new poet I stumbled upon recently. Erin Murphy has been quite a prolific writer of poetry but I didn't know about her until just the other day. I read one of her poems in a compilation book and thought I'd better have some more of her. The selection below is from her most recent book, Swoon. I'm slightly older than Erin Murphy, but not by much. I think we're both having similar experiences. A few of the references are slightly dated although they wouldn't have been five minutes ago. That's just how fast the time goes.
Nicole Kidman Appears in One of My Poems
By Erin Murphy
and it occurs to me that one fine day,
if I'm lucky enough to live that long,
I'll be giving a poetry reading at a cafe or library
and mention her name, only to look out
at a crowd of blank faces, to whom I'll say,
Oh, you're too young, the way my mother-in-law
will mention Veronica Lake, then add,
Oh, she's before your time, darling,
when the truth is, I'm barely old enough
to know anyone who uses the word darling
besides movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor
whose new perfume commercial shows her
watching a young Elizabeth Taylor movie,
which is creepy, when you think about it,
all of this representation building up like
years' worth of thick make-up or the mountains
of statistics we hear on the news, the latest of which
indicates that only 43% of today's population
was alive when JFK was assassinated,
a number that's a bit misleading since some
of us were babies gurgling in play pens
we'd now call unsafe, with slats wide enough
to trap an infant's head like the stocks
at Colonial Williamsburg, where everything
is as old as I felt when my stepdaughters
needed a name for their new Pekingese puppy
and I suggested Dionne Warwick----since
that's what the dog's scrunched up face looked like
to me----and my stepdaughters said,
You mean the psychic Hotline lady? because
that's who she was to them, not a singer
but the seer who'd tell you your fortune at 2 a.m.
for $3.99 a minute, which was more than I was paid
when I returned to teach at my alma mater
in my late 20s, and, assuming my students----
the ones who thought the Depression was the time
before Prozac----would think I was young and hip,
told them my graduation year, to which they replied,
Oh, my God, Oh, my God, which made me realize
it's all relative, or, as my junior-high best friend
and I malapropped, It's all relevant, which,
in a way, is true, except when it isn't,
like when someone asks, Who's JFK?
or (gasp) What's a poetry reading?