Golden oldies… golden years… Mary Ann texted me the other day something about the “golden years,” characteristically ironic, as if to say ‘keep your head on a swivel,’ ‘what you get, what you get, don’t fro a fit.’ She had read a then-recent blonde boy post and was encouraging me to keep on communicating with the world. I know, I know—an interpostal deictic reference. Autonomous text is an oxymoron.
So, characteristically, I googled my old friend Merriam Webster, whom I became intimate with in fifth grade. What I read buoyed me up in a perverse way. First, Merriam lists it as a plural noun, severed from the semantic fields of a single golden lucky year, a fluke alignment of the stars reserved for the fortunate few. We all get golden years. Second, M. Webster offers to use it in a sentence, assuring me of the living status of the plural noun, non-archaic, a gesture almost declined, since M.A. had already supplied an authentic example. But I wondered what a rendering of this golden oldie of a euphemism might read like in today’s online space. Check it out.
Then ubiquitous technical questions popped into view with imaginary click links and seductive icons galore. When do they start? What’s the average batch size? Can you return any you don’t like? What happens to any of them you don’t use? Are golden years wasted on the increasingly more infirm and crotchety folks? And whoever said youth is wasted on the young? If these are the golden years, what were the others? All of this stirred up a nest of Bob Dylan remnants in my auditory memory. Of course, how many years can some people exist etc., but then the yesterday, today, and tomorrow thread in Tangled Up in Blue.
I’ve been putting my song Valley of the Shadows on the iPad and hope to have a respectable version I want to play for Theresa at the Fig Tree on September 29. Valley was written long before the onset of my golden years. My plan is to bring original songs gradually into Euphemism’s Prism’s repertoire, and Theresa has encouraged me. Valley is among my favorites of the moment because it expresses my thoughts and feelings clearly on why we—I—as human consciousness(es) need not fear the loss of the light in our golden time. It has to do with a kaleidoscope and a photographic memory. The song folds up like a suitcase packed for a trip.