Sunday, February 5, 2012

THE PAST IS ALWAYS GLORIOUS.

There were these songs on all the juke boxes, the radio cackling all day and night. Love ballads belted out by the Carpenters, Andy Williams, Stevie Wonder, Beatles, Elvis Jim Reeves, , Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel.. et alii.

These songs kept everyone awake late at night, alongside ravishing photographs of mysterious girls, barefoot or straddling a balustrade, wearing elegant silk dresses, were the emotional dreams that played in our minds. The days when boys and girls spent a lot of time on campuses, clubs, smoked too many cigarettes with an undergraduate’s angst of the expenditure.

Some of them were shy to the point aggravation while some were bold and brash. The stunningly sangfroid of falling in love, the mesmerizing romance that ends in heartbreaking failure, the exquisite sadness at the end of a love affair- between two complementary narcissistic people with a shared beautiful personality disorders. To be blown over by the smell of jasmine and French perfume and secret letters is one of the mixed blessings of being twenty one and twenty four.

It was a sort of Hollywood childhood of the seventies with the usual mess and a conviction that nothing like these events will ever happen to anyone hereafter. To feel things and hang on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, to be wounded in the never ending process. Exploring like no one else ever did the crippling – social anxiety disorder and the emotional complexities that attended that era.

The women dream of marriage, and honeymoon rewarded with trips to exciting locales, better climates and romantic candle light dinners with their husbands. Sometimes a dream goes sour….. - full of hurts, recriminations, and sad stories which end up by closing the door and crying until dinner.

As we lose our youth, the growing disenchantment of living in this world creeps over all of us. The survivors are all over, and we run into them all the time, and there’s hardly a handful except some nerds that didn’t get badly into drugs or booze or some damn thing. The frayed curtains of memory slowly disintegrate, and we see them for what they were--an youthful encounter with adventure.

Slowly we sign off, we are getting old and it’s about the physical indignities that go along with aging. They include being unable to shoehorn your girth into that pair of jeans or wear your favorite shoes / slippers, spending to many hours in the waiting room of medical specialists, - having friends recommend yoga and meditation as fun things do-Oh it’s a sorry state of affairs, I never wanted to post this!

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