And you can tell everybody, this is our song …
Over our first few years of singing together, it became our song, a staple in a repertoire of songs into which listeners will stitch their own meaning too.
Over our first few years of singing together, it became our song, a staple in a repertoire of songs into which listeners will stitch their own meaning too.
“I have been 60 for four years now, and by the time you read this I will probably have been 60 for five. I survived turning 60, I was not thrilled to turn 61, I was less thrilled to turn 62, I didn’t much like being 63, I loathed being 64, and I will hate being 65. I don’t let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyanna-ish. But the honest truth is that it’s sad to be over 60.
The long shadows are everywhere ¬ friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realised.
“And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old—or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.”
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems
I’m remembering the fireworks that exploded into the sky over Slane Castle on a summer evening in 1985 when Bruce …