I'm afraid I'm becoming more brittle in a variety of ways on a daily basis. Yeah, the bones and joints creak and crack when I walk and when I rise-I've had enough of them replaced that in the event I'm involved in an accident I have a wrist bracelet listing medications, allergies, conditions and my favorite disclaimer "some assembly required."
The guy in the mirror whose face I shave weekday morning no longer looks like that Dashing Young Turk he persists in insisting he is (okay, the dashing part was always a fabrication). Point in fact, whether I like it or not, I'm not that guy anymore. Maybe I made it official when I traded my subscription for Rolling Stone in for AARP Magazine. Don't mock me-it came included in the price of a membership, and the newsletters have the locations of all the restaurants offering Early Bird specials. So now I have something to read while I play checkers while waiting to pass away. King me.
More and more of my generation are on the sidelines or up in the bleachers as the country we grew up in has become someplace we wouldn't want to visit much less have chosen in which to end our lives. The only thing we make here anymore are music videos and Lord knows I don't watch any of that crap (it's certainly not on MTV so where did it go anyway?). We have become our parents, you whipper-snappers.
Take a look through your wardrobe and at the UN of labels hanging out in your closet....everywhere from Sri Lanka to Lesotho and everyplace in between. I now live in a part of the country that had textiles as a core industry until after the end of World War II when cheap(er) labor in the non-union southern United States enticed industries to leave and then a generation later, NAFTA, shifted those jobs to countries farther south, where a living wage isn't even a clever concept.
And I drink orange juice and eat seedless grapes from points in the hemisphere it takes me ten minutes to find on an atlas-another change, and not for the better, from when I was a kid. And it dawns on me as I write this at the end of a cold, grey day in March as we ready for the coming of Spring and those lazy, hazy days of summer to follow, that every day's the end of days for some and because we don't know with any certainty for whom the bell tolls doesn't mean it will not toll.
I remember a snatch of melody from a song on an album long past and no longer wonder 'how long' but, rather, marvel at 'how true.' "I don't see next year's crop and I sit here on the back porch in the twilight. And I hear the crickets hum, I sit and watch the lightning in the distance but the showers never come. I sit here and listen to the wind blow. I sit here and rub my hands; I sit here and listen to the clock strike and I wonder when I'll see my companion again."
-bill kenny
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