I’m high from getting all the stuff done that I had wanted to get done, so I roll down the window to take in the tempered breeze seeming to herald spring’s approach and me all randy, so I stroll down Isaacs like a high school idiot cruising up Division on a Friday or Saturday night back in the day, turned up my ingratio-tunes, old school classic chassy romantic fantastical sing-alongs, and roll in at a con-store to pick up an iced frap in a bottle and chug that like it’s a beer, not caring about the caffeine against personal policy at 6:30 pm because I still have a few hours and miles to go. Living it up – me, as close as I get these days. On the edge Me. Needing to bust out like I’m all full of piss and hope and youthful energy. This is me on President’s Day, which I in no way observe, but it’s a Monday, a free one, and I’m on my way to choral society rehearsal where an old woman my mom’s age (but more alive and gregarious as hell and really needing to get out of the house where she’s been dutifully caring for her husband with cancer) talks me up non-stop for 15 or 20 because she recognized me from before and neither of us had been singing in the group for 7 or 8 years now, and are now delightfully met, along with the 4 or 5 others I had known in other contexts; then one of the old choir veteran tenors, head full of snow white hair and snow white beard to match, comes up to my seat, bends over with his hands on his knees, and conspiratorily says, “Now, back in the old days…” and he emphasizes “old” and I, like the silly smartass I can be for fun in social situations says, “You mean the Jurassic? the Paleolithic?” and he smiles and says he’d sung next to met at the high school gym when the choir was known by a different name and I says, “I don’t remember singing there, when was this?” and he says, “In the early 80’s” and I says, “Couldn’t have been me, I was just out of high school and into college,” and he looks at me, and there’s that delicious pause, you know what I mean, where the penny drops, then grinning in his teeth because he’s mistook me for someone older (I’m 60, he’s 85 and apparently neither of us likes acting our age much) he goes, “Well, hell, thanks a lot,” and turns to walk away and I laugh because of course this is a punch line, me laughing like a hyena or gleeful witch like I do in these social moments when I can entertain myself with a raucous cackle for the sheer fun and joy of that particular human activity – secretely figuring that a lot of folks forgot somewhere that laughing is a better music for the soul and world both than whining and bitching, them that dropped their selfless joy somewhere along the way of getting caught up in who the next prez is going to be and never bothering to go looking for it.
Word Pictures 