Forever young

Frank-Sinatra-007

Right now on the radio there is someone murdering this brilliant song,

I am tempted to call NASA to have them shot into space.

I am becoming increasingly intolerant of poor music, I realise that it is a matter of taste as well but this current trend of howling your way through a perfectly good song in some vain attempt to place your own mark on it is, quite frankly,  a little old now.

Last year I was visit my old friend who is a retired saxophonist. He has a fantastic stereo system with high quality turntable and crisp speakers. I was just getting my jacket off and he was hustling me in to the sofa, he was clearly excited about something.

Once seated, he quieted me and went over to his sound system. He had been listening to an old Frank Sinatra album and was newly excited about it, he was talking quickly about the rubbish music in Wal-mart and how you couldn’t make out half of what was being sung.

Talking over he motioned with his hand for ‘silence,’ the steady crackle of needle on vinyl was the only sound. Soon the orchestra began and steadily built through the introduction, from the first intonation of the first word there was perfect clarity. This was a fifty year old recording on obsolete analogue technology but the diction and pronunciation of this great singer were exact.

The strings were not the only instrument that were heard. Those vocal chords were tuned to perfection and controlled in such a way that is not often heard in our day.

That was last year.

This year the spark of excitement has faded, several low blows have taken their toll on my friend and his enthusiast outlook.

The illness that we share has a habit of doing this. It creeps up unawares and robs you of your future hope, thankfully, for us ,it also passes with time and there returns a measure of optimism and hope.

When I was young I was a very serious person, I was forced to grow up fairly quickly due to circumstances, but I was quite a serious thinker anyway.  I was often accused of being old before my time because I refused to run to the excesses of my peers. I just viewed it as being true to my convictions.

Now that I am well and truly middle aged there seems to be a lot of my peer group who have yet to grow up.

I don’t mean that they ought to get brown clothes and slippers and stop trying, but they are still go into the same bars that they did 20 years ago with the same crowd in one endlessly repeating weekend. They just never moved on from that.

We have all met the people who settle into a rut and repeat the same year with a different number on the end. Similarly we have met the perpetual adrenalin junkies who cannot ever settle into or on anything.

The great challenge for us all is to stay fresh in our thinking while recognising what stage and season of our lives that we are in.

We won’t stay forever young in our bodies, they each have an allotment of days, some more than others, no matter how unfair that sounds. We can do a lot to stay healthier physically and mentally but we alone choose whether we die while alive or stay young while maturing into the years that we have.

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22 thoughts on “Forever young

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