Funny thing; it’s not really funny, maybe ironic but not funny; what it is is language that misappropriates words yet the audience gets it. Anyway; funny how we string words together, how stories find their way, what we remember, what we forget. I remember a time when my children were children and my own childhood was still at my fingertips. The feelings and memories were not only available but actively engaged with being, becoming a grownup. My youth has been reviewed so many times yet recall wears thin over time, it slips away and all you remember are random flashbacks. It is not unlike revisiting a favorite book where you can thumb your way to a favorite passage. Years passing take their toll. This is too profound for me to claim it as my own but I borrow it frequently; “. . . memory loses its way not so much because the brain looses its function but because there is so much more to remember.” A man of fewer words might say, “I have all those memories filed away but have no idea where I left them.”
I discovered Bob Seger’s music in the mid 1980’s, in my own mid 40’s. Young people thought me too old to be trusted and my elders saw me as an experiment in progress. So I was literally like the candle, burning both ends. In self defense I identified with Bob Seger. What a storyteller! If you can take a complex, 250 page story and reduce it to three verses and a bridge with rhythm and a tune, people will sell out your concerts.
My favorite Seger song is, “Against The Wind”. Somehow I think he must have tapped into my veins on that one, that I have a legitimate investment in that story. It spans a lifetime. As his journey closes in on its destination he reflects; “. . . life is full of deadlines and commitments, what to leave in and what to leave out.” I am a few years senior to Bob Seger but not many. The song is from another century but then so we are. “. . . breaking all of the rules that would bend . . . searching for shelter again and again.”
The 5th grade is a blur of generalities other than our teacher’s name and that she was a mean old woman. We got to play softball on the big field with the 6th graders. When we chose sides I went in the middle round. Softball; that was one thing I could do but Mrs. Ervin didn’t know, didn’t care. I was still struggling with multiplication tables, slow reading. She was impatient, maybe even unforgiving with the likes of me. So now that I thumb through the pages, I do have some memories.
I remember the Polio pandemic. They shut down swimming pools and we had to stick close to home. Some kids were left crippled. President Roosevelt had polio, needed steel leg braces and a wheel chair. We went to a clinic when the serum came along where they dropped a few drops on a sugar cube for us to chew up. After a few years, polio was gone. But we remembered the braces and crutches, nobody wanted that. Now the same kids, old men now, we are dodging a new virus. Kids for the most part get a free pass on Covid-19. The bad news is for senior citizens. Braces and crutches are nothing compared to a ventilator. Still running . . . against the wind.
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