This evening, for the second time in the last few days, I was listening to music and was suddenly jolted by an awareness of the passage of time. After my wife and I finished dinner, I was hand-picking a few favorite tunes, one of which was “Blue Sky” by The Allman Bros. The song still stirs me deeply, although in a different way than it did when I first came to love it over 45 years ago. The other episode of time compression came on Sunday afternoon/evening. My wife, Sally, and daughter, Sara, and I went out to a place in Royal Oak to see our friend Charlie Springer perform. Sally and I started seeing Charlie at various finer establishments around town over forty years ago.
As Charlie and his cohorts deftly worked their way through another familiar song, I sat about twenty feet away and was suddenly knocked back about four decades. On the intellectual level, I am aware of the time that has passed. I know how long forty-plus years is. It’s just that in the two incidents, the gap between way back then and right now disappeared. I could see, hear, and feel both points on eternity’s continuum with brilliant clarity, yet the moments and decades between seemed lost in the vapor. The music still stirs me greatly, but, on deeper consideration, it does so now in very different ways.
“Blue Sky” was one of those songs that filled me with energy and optimism. It made me feel powerful, jubilant, and full of appreciation for the beauty of the world. It still stirs me that way today, but it has evolved into much more. Charlie’s music was so important to Sally and I back then that we asked him to play at our wedding, which he did. His music made up much of the soundtrack of our early life together. We lost track of him for about thirty years, but were fortunate to reconnect several years ago. Seeing him play again takes us back and takes us forward at the same time.
These two musical thunderbolts have me thinking about where the time has gone. The music inspired a sense of optimism and energy back then which has been supplanted by a deeper sense of wisdom and reflection. A full and fair scrutiny of the time gone by would show a life with many great moments with the ones I love, but often one lived too carefully and too fearfully. In screenwriting parlance, the years covered here would be the pages of Act Two. Act Two is where the story unfolds. It is where the hero’s journey takes place and the conflict plays out to a resolution. At an age of a few years into my sixties, when I should be heading into Act Three, these sparks of inspiration have me pondering the notion of a re-write of Act Two. I’ve now felt what it’s like for forty-plus years to melt into a moment. With that in mind, I guess anything is possible. It’s never too late until you let it be too late.
This End Up 