I couldn’t take any more of the local sports talk meatheads and the bad oldies and the decent stations playing not-so-decent stuff as I snaked my way down Route 67 on the way home from work, so I fumbled through the old CD holder, looking for a song commensurate to the occasion, and to my mood.
We tend to associate birthdays with celebration, and perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that, especially as we age. As the years go by seems like more and more of the people you love wind up on the other side, and the other side goes from a vague concept you maybe think about occasionally to something you know lies in wait for you before not all that much longer, so I suppose, on the one hand, a celebration fits: any day above ground is a good one, as I said to a workmate earlier today.
But I felt on the wrong side of morose rather than the right side of celebratory as I drove on toward home tonight.
I looked back and forth between the CDs and the road.
I see an aqua-colored disc that looks familiar, and pick it out. Dylan’s “Time Out of Mind.”
“Shadows are fallin’
and I been here all day
It’s too hot to sleep
And time is runnin’ away…
It’s not dark yet
But it’s gettin’ there…”
Bob Dylan, "Not Dark Yet"
Damn. I remember this one, remember hearing it for the first time. Sometime in the late summer or early fall of 1997. I’d just escaped the bank and gone to work someplace else. Gone from the doghouse to the penthouse. Not literally, of course. The bank job was in an elegant old downtown building, and the new job was in a not-so-elegant dumpy building a few blocks uptown, and the new job paid a hell of a lot less and held a lot less of what one might call career prospects.
But I felt OK with going to work for a change. I started out part-time, which was luxurious enough, but on top of that, my friends Michele and Bob and Phil worked in the same building with me, and instead of having to listen to right-wing bullshit all day I got to listen to their banter, and their music. Most mornings I’d sit down and bang out a few pages on my still-unfinished first novel; those first six months I think I spit out about 225 pages or so. Lauren worked, too, and we had a nice place and enough money to live well. I couldn’t believe my luck.
Bob had what at the time were a set of hot speakers attached to his computer, and he’d play stuff while we worked, and at some point, he brought in this Dylan CD. I’d sort of given up on Dylan by then, he hadn’t put out anything decent in years, and I’d seen him a few years before that in Saratoga, mostly because I wanted to see Steve Earle open for him, and Earle blew him off the stage, not long before he blew himself off the face of the earth for several years.
Anyway, “Time Out of Mind” came out of those hot speakers with some regularity, and while I liked the whole thing, “Not Dark Yet” hit me the hardest. I used to imagine myself listening to it a few years down the road, when the it’s gettin’ there part would ring a little louder, though I couldn’t have imagined then what it would be like to listen to it as I did today.
&&&
I slid the disc into the player and turned up the volume. The funereal opening chords poured out.
Sixteen years have passed since I first heard this, I thought.
We all have our own math we use to make sense of things, to get by.
Some of the sights of those sixteen years float across my mind, and it doesn’t seem like long at all; 1997 seems close enough to touch, and if it is, then sixteen years from now seems as close, and I do the math, forty-eight plus sixteen, holy shit, in that same blink of an eye that has ’97 on the tips of my fingers I’ll be sixty-four. If I’m lucky, and how I hope I am that lucky, and I think of the people that never even made it to forty-eight, let alone sixty-four.
If I’m lucky.
&&&
Every day at lunch time I take a walk through the neighborhood around the office, and now, it definitely is the penthouse; so-called summer cottages of the unbelievably wealthy line the streets I stroll, houses that cost far more in mere property taxes than I earn in a year.
Within five minutes, though, as I pick up the pace and approach something closer to a jog, I don’t even notice the places, I get lost in a reverie, of what was, of what might have been, of what may be, and of what will never be, and I wind up dazed, far beyond the present, just the dream-world of my thoughts and the warmth of the sun and the sweat on the back of my neck seeming real.
I get back to the office and they ask my how the walk was, and it takes me a minute or two to realize I’m back.
Fantastic, I say.
I don’t say anything else. I certainly don’t mention how elated I feel to be alive in those moments when I’m walking back to my desk, my legs rubbery but calming down, the collar of my t-shirt wet, my breath coming back to me.
&&&
I’m a lucky bastard, I think as the walk ends today. Lucky. Think of all the starvation, all the war-torn misery; think of all the awful fates so many who have ever walked the face of this earth have suffered, and here I stand, loved and loving dearly, swaddled in comfort few across the millennia of civilization have ever seen: warmth in the face of winter’s cold, cool in the face of summer’s heat, trying to resist eating too much as a supposed cross to bear.
Oh, I’ve suffered, yes tragedy has crossed my path, but even then, at my lowest moments, I had the luxury of time and money and the immeasurable comfort of people who cared enough to carry me until I could walk again.
&&&
The song plays on, and I drive into town.
I head into the supermarket to pick up a few things for dinner, and then I walk to the wine store to pick up a bottle or two. I get back into the car, the windows down, the sun shining upon me, and I wend my way through the parking lot.
A woman in a white shirt and a long gray-and-white striped skirt wanders out in front of me, and I think, hey, watch it.
That’s my wife, I realize.
I pull up beside her, the song blaring out the open windows.
She recognizes me and smiles, rests her hands on the passenger side door.
You lookin’ for a date or something mister, she asks with a laugh.
I’m good, I say.
I’m just going in to get you a birthday cake, she tells me.
See you soon, I say.
&&&
After all this luck I didn’t deserve, I don’t have the right to ask for even one last fantastic walk, for so much as one more breath.
But as the song plays on, I realize the source of my melancholy.
I don’t have the right to ask for so much as one more breath, but for the most part, these forty-eight years have been fantastic.
I don’t have the right to ask, but I can’t help it: it’s not dark yet, and I’d like to keep it that way for a while longer.