Old Growing Young
Staring into the void above the skyline one day
I spotted a boy drifting about
The remembrance by teachers and classmates gone
His slouch of much adult disdain
Hair all about covering his eyes
Hey, Buddy, I said
You’re hard to forget, you know?
While you hovered
They murdered a president
Special guy stepped on the moon
The blond we used to sneak a calendar peek for
Took the sleeping pill route of escape
Died alone in a Santa Monica hotel room.
Often I thought of you
And your fascination with teacher’s squeaking chalk
Scribbling blackboard assignments you seldom did
The hushed whispers of girls you never met
The brainy ones slumped over their lessons
Your house’s resident mouse scampering for cookie crumbs
Gathering dinner before parents and child got home
I can see Kukla Fran and Ollie on the old black and white tube
You laughing in an empty house
On the long cloudless skies of a July weekend
Must have registered bouts of imagined loveliness, eh?
The simple joys of picking apples I the country
Petting the dog you never had
The used Schwinn bike that got stolen
The always short downpours that made the air so clean
Must still make you ache with aloneness
Longing to stay by my side
As I drive a NY cab
Aging has a secret focus… remembering pluses and minuses of youth.
They say that memory is selective. While we remember vividly trauma. We also remember with a kind of rose-colored glasses, how things were in our youth. Why I guess oldsters always think that their youth was the best time not only in their lives, but everyone's. History shows us clearly that was not so. The last century was a hellhole of Great Depression, a killer pandemic, two world wars killing more people than almost counted with the immense destruction, wars of genocide, and finally, a Cold War building a cadre of nuclear weapons that can easily destroy the world multiple times over.
Ron