Markness Visible

We children had, for instance, proper hands; our fluid, pliant fingers joined their skin.  Adults had misshapen, knuckly hands loose in their skin like bones in bags; it was a wonder they could open jars.  They were loose in their skins all over, except at the wrists and ankles, like rabbits.

We were whole, we were pleasing to ourselves.  Our crystalline eyes shone from firm, smooth sockets; we spoke in pure, piping voices through dark, tidy lips.  Adults were coming apart, but they neither noticed nor minded.

Perhaps Annie Dillard was right, in that passage from her brilliant memoir An American Childhood: perhaps the adults in her life didn't notice or care about their incipient decrepitude.  Or perhaps, brilliant and precocious observer though she was, the young Annie missed the whole and true adult reaction to their changing bodies.

One of the things I found most frustrating as a younger parent was the fact, which I have expressed many times to (too) many people,  that childhood is so brief, adulthood so long.  Children grow up in a flash: birth to toddlerhood takes less than a minute, preschool-to-highschool about a week,  and then they're your contemporaries, in a fashion, though they'll always be your babies.  Adulthood, though: even if it's just nominal, as in my case, adulthood is, if we are fortunate, a long plateau.  Oh, sure, there are subtle changes along that plateau--a few extra pounds, some lines and wrinkles, aches and pains that didn't use to come, or were sloughed off quickly if they did--but, for the most part, most of us are designed for a 40 or so year cruise at the height of health and power,  accumulating knowledge and wisdom, abilities and skills that further the race in our natural roles.

And then, around 60, things start to change.  Hair turns gray at 20, for some people, and falls out at 30 for others.  Wrinkles gradually happen.  But in the 60's real and portentous change starts in earnest.  Wrinkles deepen, widen, proliferate; age spots show up; aches and pains worsen and become chronic; skin does sag and loosen, as Dillard notes.  Weight shifts, even if it doesn't increase any more.  As the old saw has it, "As I get older, I find I have a particular furniture problem: my chest is in my drawers."  Gravity is not our friend; sure, it keeps us on the planet, but increasingly it reminds us that our connection to the earth is getting even closer and will eventually be deeper.  I see it happening in the mirror and in my friends and loved ones, and it is sobering.

I've been mulling an update of Allen Ginsburg's most famous work to address these issues, although re-doing the whole thing would be way too daunting.  I have the first lines ("I squinted at the best bodies of my generation destroyed by gravity and excess, far from starving, hysterically naked,/dragging themselves from bed at dawn looking angrily for the Fixodent", and the title (I hope you think I do titles pretty well; I think it's my strongest suit),  Jowl.  If it hasn't been done, it's surely ripe for it.  Maybe by you?

And then Levon Helm died last week, as I'm sure most of you know.  Last of The Band's three fabulous and distinctive vocalists and maybe the best-known, for his leads on The Weight, The Night They Drove..., Rag, Mama, Rag, Cripple Creek and a slew of others, as well as for his rock-steady drumming, mandolin-playing, solo albums, and his few acting roles, most famously in Coal Miner's Daughter.  At the height of psychedelic excess The Band carved out a much simpler sound, a slice of Americana (though Helm was the only American in the group), a return to three-or-four-minute story songs with understated yet virtuosic musicianship.  Their very name bore out their ethos (no "Strawberry Alarm Clock"s or "Cat Mother and the All-Night Newsboys" for them), and none other than god himself, in the guise of Eric Clapton,  a veteran of great excess, both musical and recreational, during stints in The Bluesbreakers, Cream, and Blind Faith, championed their music, said it changed his life, and hoped to join forces with them.  They already had a pretty good guitar player in Robbie Robertson, so EC got his roots fix on a tour with Delaney and Bonnie instead.  Lots of rockers flamed out early, of course, and died in rock-star ways.  That Levon Helm, a determinedly "normal" star died at an age and in a manner so "normal" hit me harder, I think, than the deaths of many others.  I'll play a couple of hours of Levon and The Band, then, as well as Gene Clark's "Some Misunderstanding," which I find sad and elegaic and uplifting at the same time.  Hope you can join me on Tuesday, noon-till-two eastern at 100.1 FM, wool.fm intergalactically.

Life is a carnival, believe it or not....