On Aging

I remember as a young girl being in the car with my father.  We were listening to WLS on the AM radio, and I sang along with some teeny-bopper song or another.  My father asked me “do you really like this music?” in that fatherly tone of voice that said “you don’t really like this music, do you?”  But I told him the music was great, so lively, and the words were good, too.  I was about eight years old.

Aqualung.  Frampton Comes Alive.  Tapestry.  These are the albums of my youth.  I only need two chords, maybe three on the more obscure songs, to be swept immediately back to Park Forest, hanging on the corner of Lakewood and Rocket Circle with Marci and Renee, or cruising around in Babycakes, the lemon yellow VW bug with an 8-track that saved our family’s quiet peace by providing a ride other than the brown Chevy station wagon.

Music will transport you.  Now consider.  In 2011, music that was new in the early 70’s is, well, forty years old.  40.  Four-ty.  When I was twelve, forty year-old music would have been from 1932.  The big band era.  Not even close to nostalgic.  Just old.  Even my mother would have been too young to appreciate music that old, being herself born in 1932.  When I was twelve, few people had any interest in forty year old music. 

Still, here I am in 2011 with my musical tastes firmly rooted in the 70’s.  Jackson Browne was at his best – “How long have I been running for that morning flight, through the whispered promises and the changing light of the bed where we both lie, late for the sky.”  Just try not to feel wistful.

Who can forget Dan Fogelberg’s “To the Morning”?  Certainly not me.  My suitemates in 109 Crissey played it every morning my sophomore fall.  Every morning.  It was their, and thus my, wakeup call.  Of course it was true, there is no way to say no to the morning, no matter how desperately much you might want to.  Say for instance if you’re a 19-year-old college student who wraps up a busy night of studying by polishing off a bottle of Lambrusco with a senior English major who wants to quote you Shakespeare’s sonnets until four a.m.  Morning still comes.

When I sing these songs today, in front of my young nieces and nephews, their eyes glaze over and they reach for their iPods. 

Now I hear a song with a chorus modified for radio into “Forget You” by a slick character known as Cee-lo Green.  It has a lively melody, a jumping beat, and an acid-sharp spirit.  “You don’t want me?  Well F you.”  And I want to ask the kids, “do you really like this music?”

I don’t remember our music being so sharp.  Our songs were love songs, or make-love songs.  Some were anti-war, or can’t we live as friends songs.  The only enemy was, as Pete Townshend put it,  “Hope I die before I get old.”

Too late.