'An Echo of a Song a Stranger Sang'

I’m reminded of my age only when someone holds a door open for me (That’s my job!) or performs some other courtesy. I was returning to my car from the university library, carrying a canvas tote bag of books, walking with the aid of my cane, as usual, when a young man asked if he could carry them for me. A complicated set of reactions: 1). That’s what a boy asks a girl. 2). Do I look like a cripple? 3). Thoughtfulness and good manners aren’t extinct after all.  

The essential image of ourselves we carry around with us doesn’t really age. We’re simultaneously twelve, forty-three and whatever age we happen to be at the moment. I’ve known too many who are preoccupied with getting older, an obsession now exploited by multiple industries. Dr. Johnson puts it like this in The Rambler on September 8, 1750:

 

 "To secure to the old that influence which they are willing to claim, and which might so much contribute to the improvement of the arts of life, it is absolutely necessary that they give themselves up to the duties of declining years, and contentedly resign to youth its levity, its pleasures, its frolics, and its fopperies. It is a hopeless endeavour to unite the contrarieties of spring and winter; it is unjust to claim the privileges of age and retain the playthings of childhood.”

 

Some regard youthfulness as their most valuable possession, and it evaporates. The notion of age as a sort of rapprochement with existence seems to be disappearing. Time to learn the pleasures of memory. Here is Dick Davis’ poem “Leaving the Fair”:

 

“Imagine that you’re at a raucous fair,

The kind you went to sixty years ago—

The beckoning booths, just pennies for a throw,

Loud barkers, louder hawkers everywhere,

Such promises of pleasure in the air . . .

A plunging carousel, a puppet show,

A tent for movies, Marilyn Monroe

Fixing the tumult with her glaucous stare.

 

“And now you walk away from all its noise,

The too bright colors busy in your mind

But less so since you’re leaving them behind

As if you knew they’re someone else’s toys.

That’s what old age is like . . . the whole shebang

An echo of a song a stranger sang.”

 

Davis turned seventy-nine last April. I turn seventy-two later this month.

 

[Davis’ poem is included in Love in Another Language (Carcanet, 2017).]