My People

            On most days when I don’t play golf, I walk a couple of miles around the pond at the park in Zephyrhills.  It’s a good park, with lots of ducks and kids, and it has groups of musicians who gather every Sunday to play for mostly older locals who sit on lawn chairs and have picnics.  And there are always birthday parties for little ones and old ones alike, with banners that read, for example, “Happy 80^th Agnes!”

            I usually listen to my own music while I walk.  I thought about getting myself an iPod, but decided in the end that I didn’t want to learn about music files, how to download them, and how to operate the device.  I didn’t figure it could be too hard to learn, but why bother, I asked myself, when I have a perfectly usable Walkman somewhere in the garage?   

Sony still makes some version of the Walkman these days, but when I got mine in the 1980s, it was still pretty new on the market.  It was a wonderful technological advance that let us do pretty much anything we wanted to and listen to our music at the same time, our ears just about completely covered up with clunky headphones. That was more than thirty years ago, and I was already into my middle age, but I thought back then that it would be very cool to keep up with music and with technology and to have a Walkman.

            Now I’m going on seventy and keeping up doesn’t seem so important any more.  The Walkman is just fine, thank you very much.

            And the music I listen to is from my own first forty years, mostly doo wop “classics” from the 1950s and 1960s, songs by groups like Dion and the Belmonts, the Five Satins, and the Del Vikings.  I especially like the ballads with a pure falsetto line that lingers sweetly just above the melody.  Even today the songs remain dear to me, evocative of a time when everything was larger than life, magnified to distortion—my adolescence.

            So when I began walking around Zephyr Park, I fished out my old Walkman, recorded a couple of dozen old songs from CDs to cassette tapes, and now I can be as technologically and musically oblivious to the present as I want to be.  And I do in fact want to be exactly that.

            In fact, the present weighs less and less heavily on me as I live my seventieth year, and the past is more and more comfortable to me.  I doubt I can be unique in this, so I deduce from my own experience a related thought, that death must come as a relief to many old-timers (most, maybe) simply because so many of the people we have loved all our lives have already gone before us, leaving us in a constant state of mourning, more and more alone every year. The people and things we cherish most are largely in the past.  There comes a time, I think, when we begin to feel that we are currently living in a place that has too many holes in it.  Too many absences.  And very often, too many heartbreaking pains.

            Making it worse is that old people gradually find themselves in a place run by (and overrun by) young people, whose language and life styles and tastes (and music too) are very different from their own, from the generation they grew up with and were a part of.  They don’t fit in any more, even with their children and grandchildren.  The only place they feel at ease is with the rapidly diminishing members of their own generation.  Eventually, it just seems a comfort to think about dying and taking one’s place among the legion of dead and buried whom they belong to, belong with.  That’s what I think, anyway.

For me survival at any cost has lost its urgency and been replaced by a calming sense that death may really be nothing more than a desirable and natural release from a life lived as well as I could live it, but which perhaps is on the verge of being a tad too long for comfort.  I can see that when the final sickness and death are upon me, I won’t fight it very much—may even welcome it.

            Mind you, I’m happily married for forty-five years and have not yet arrived at that unhappy state—nor do I have any inclination to speed the process along.  My Walkman will be fine for the immediate future.  But when I squint a little bit, I can dimly see a band of already-gone saints (and sinners) looming on the horizon, beckoning to me.  My people.