In this liminal space we call old age, simultaneously becoming and un-becoming, growing more and more into my self and out of my life, I go over and over the joys and sorrows that add up to this fine experience of living: at once uniquely personal and utterly universal.
In this limited space where I live and die at once – reminding myself we are all doing that, every moment since our birth, though we only become aware of it later (if we do become aware) – between these parentheses, I begin to awaken. Even as the ‘long sleep’ looms.
Who is the weaver? On whose loom stretches my life?
Someone in a Netflix movie sings, chirpily, ‘What a difference a day makes…’ and I am taken right back to being seventeen, slow dancing with the lights turned low, among other couples at the end of a student party, while on the record player some singer with a sleepy voice, some singer who sounded like Nat King Cole, crooned the words, the soft, electrifying words, as we stood and swayed on the spot together in the crowded room, each entwined pair alone in a circle of two.
A small, inconsequential memory. Nothing of any great importance in my life happened to me that evening. No coupling up with any of the dancing strangers. It was just a place and time where I happened to be, briefly. Not my scene. Yet a flash of music, so momentary, so differently sung, revives it from some old corner of memory, with all the sexual longing which the room was full of that night as the other young bodies around me danced slower and slower, closer and closer, into full embrace, and the music sighed and stopped.
The many tiny moments of my life return to me so, at random, in between the goings-about of my here-and-now. Even the most insignificant now feel precious. This is a thing that happened. This is a thing I witnessed. This is a thing I did. They matter to me, my small and personal days, my unimportant nights. I lived them. They happened to me, each one unique, and will not happen again.
Always / never … now / never again.
Note: After Google insists Nat King Cole never sang it, and I hunt through YouTube for all the male singers who did, it has to have been Frank Sinatra – that exact inflection and tempo – though I remember it as being sung much softer. Perhaps the record player too was turned down low.
Written for Poets and Storytellers United's Friday Writings #207: In Between.
