Ahhh Youth!

November is that time of year when I tend to settle in for the winter. 

It’s an old habit going back to my days on the road. I wouldn’t hit the road, thumbs out, guitar, and pack all rigged after October. When November arrived, it would have to be some thing big to dig me out of the Single-room-occupancy hole I had selected for winter. Just to be clear, the world was a vastly different place then. Most cities I traveled to had a stock of less-than-optimal apartments, rooms, and studios. Someone like me could afford one on the sort of low-wage resources available. 

I tended to prefer life in the working-class slum of Boston’s backside of Beacon Hill. We were only blocks from our “betters” on the front side of the Hill. But those of us who lived in the less elite neighborhood shopped at the same Star Market as those from the well-to-do front side. There was a sort of retail democracy. Mrs. Downy from Mount Vernon St on the front side compared sweet potatoes with Mrs. Kadabowski from Joy St. on the backside. We all had coffee and donuts at the Tarry and Taste on Charles Street. And we used the same all-night pharmacy, and emergency room at the Mass General Hospital. The Charles St coffeehouses were friendly refuges for all. And most of what you needed was within walking distance: the world in an oyster.

Its main failings were the sort of wet, frozen dankness that came off the harbor and the nearby Charles River. We dreaded the slippery obsidian-like skin of ice that formed on the Brick sidewalks. But worse the creaky steam heat in the apartment houses never quite took the chill off.

Just thinking of this makes me feel young. There’s a mean-spiritedness in the world that encourages many of us to sniff at youth. We were foolish, the crank says. We didn’t know what the hell we were about, and we wasted opportunity. Sure we did. But we learned, loved, and grew by experience. Understand, old timer, giving up on youth just because there are some creaks in the bones, is the true beginning of age. There is more than one peak in life.

For me, I believe in the old saying that just because you age, you do not have to grow old.