As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
You reach an age when the ropes tying you to reality start to slacken. Your eyesight becomes fuzzier, so you can’t visually apprehend the world with the old clarity. You may develop arthritis, meaning your grip isn’t as sure. Your teeth start to wobble and crack, so even eating is less of the no-brainer it was before. You’re slower. You’re more tired. You simply don’t seem as connected to the world, as bolted on.
So you have to make a conscious effort to grab it with both gnarled hands, and keep hanging on while you still can.
Wouldn’t it be fascinating to encounter a woman, or a man, untouched by thousands of years of gender roles and patriarchy, unfettered by all those limitations and expectations — for both sexes. What would they be like?
In concert crowds (and other times in life), you carve the quickest and surest path when you look at where you’re going, not at the people in the way.
There are horses which cannot be broken, for better and worse: and they do not make good partners for those who came into the world already trained.
The reason why we’re so keen on suing companies for false advertising is we can’t do it with the people we love.
As always, if you can think of anyone who might enjoy this Substack, please spread the word.
You're in a poetic mood today...
I feel like the more physically inept I become, with hands and elbows hurting, books being read twice as far away as normal and nights being split up into how many times I have to wee, the more all that aging actually grounds me to reality and to the now. The more I become physically grounded, the less control I have of when and where my imagination takes me. "Only in their dreams can men be truly free. Twas always thus and always thus will be" John Keating
I genuinely can't imagine what the innocents would truly be like.
I like to think of it as "it's not where you're going to, it's who you're going through"
I'm in the fortunate position of entering my mid-forties relatively untouched by time. My hair, though increasingly grey, stubbornly grows; my eyesight is good and, according to the optician, unlikely now to deteriorate for decades; my teeth are solid; my parents are alive and currently on a tour of South America.
So what obsesses me is not what I have lost, but what I am about to lose. Especially my parents.