Can you sing the next line?
The song is, Into the Mystic. The artist Van Morrison, the album Moondance, soundtrack of my twenties.
I’m not meant to be writing this. I’m meant to be in Lidl buying milk again, but this song came on the radio and within seconds I was crying and because I couldn’t work out why, I came home and started writing …
This is the edited version, because now I know why. The next line is:
Also younger than the sun …
And you see that lyric instantly takes me back to a time when I was younger than the sun. For me, it means the Spring of 1992. It means I’m back on the cruise ship, in Ft Lauderdale, slim, tanned and yes, very, very, young.
It means, Mateo, with a Mexican mother and an American father, asking me if we had something going on here, Caary. The flat sexy drawl he made of my name, almost a compensation for the fact that he was as wide as he was short, and he was fairly short.
Almost, because no, we didn’t have anything going on, but it wasn’t surprising that he’d asked.
Three months I’d been working as a fitness instructor on that cruise ship. Mondays in Paradise Island, Nassau, Wednesdays in Green Turtle Cay.
I was slim as a pin, with a Mia Farrow pixie crop. I partied until four and got up at eight to teach the morning aerobics class (throwing up once, five minutes before).
I survived on ice-cream and cigarettes. I had not a scintilla of cellulite and for the first time in my life I was tanned and living in a climate where I could actually show off that tan. My favourite dress was a white mini, with a cut-out panel to display my toned midriff.
Hang on …
I know what you’re thinking.
Why? Why flirt if you weren’t interested?
The answer is simple.
Because I could.
And now I know where that fit of grief in the car came from.
It came from knowing that those days are gone, that a power I once possessed has been lost. That I am no longer, younger than the sun.
Ageing is both a privilege and a hurt. You see I’m fifty-five and nowadays when I walk into a room, no one notices. Conversations with younger men come with … how can I describe this? Let’s call it a polite reserve, a metaphorical barrier I’m not sure they even realise they’ve erected. (Forgive the pun, there really was no more suitable word.) Either way there is a distance, a capping of engagement level, which did not exist before. I can’t be the only one who has noticed this?
And it’s not as if I miss it. The allure of youth, the ability to flirt up a storm with whomever fitted the bill.
It’s just that sometimes, caught unawares, a song lyric, a musical chord, will slice open my heart easier than a knife through butter. Music, on a par with poetry, seems to forge more direct neural patterns than any other form of art. It can and does bypass the chaos and to-do-lists of your frontal lobe, reaching right back to prod with a careless jab all those slumbering memories.
So if I hear, Brown Eyed Girl, I’m not in Stockholm, driving my son to tennis, I’m lying on a beach in Cozumel, white sand between my toes, my French boyfriend, P, whispering beside me (in French!) Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U? Well I’m leaning over the bar to talk to S, a black-haired, scar-cheeked, ridiculously handsome Irish lorry driver. Dexys Midnight Runners, Come on Eileen? I’m dangling my legs over the quay wall of my hometown, sharing a can of cider with a long-haired hippy whose name I just can’t recall anymore. Spandau Ballet’s True? I’m sixteen, trembling with excitement and fear as I follow D onto the dance floor for my very first slow dance – and in this one I can even remember what I wore.
But this is not really about the men who were once present in my life, or indeed the transient power I might once have had over them. A power, that like all suns, is destined only to fade. It’s more a vulnerability to the destabilising pull of nostalgia that leaves me yearning both for whom I once was, and for the people in my life who have come and gone.
Because yes, it’s a privilege to have so many memories to look back upon, it’s just that sometimes the place from which I get to view them can feel very wobbly indeed.
Tell me I’m not alone in this? Which songs sweep the rug from under your feet? I’d love to know.
P.S.
This week’s post has a postscript.
I don’t think I’ve been totally honest. I suspect that a part of my wobbliness is down to sheer tiredness. You see my book publishes on Tuesday. It’s taken ten years to get here, a long and sometimes very lonely journey. A Midlife Holiday was turned down by three UK publishers on the grounds that, ‘they loved it but were already committed to too similar an author/project’. For a writer, that’s the hardest knock of all. So, I had a choice. Either shelve a decade of work and all the books I’d written so far (six in total). Or take the plunge and publish myself.
I’m doing it myself, and the response I’ve received has left me delighted to have made that decision.
There are over thirty-five reviews now on my Goodreads author page. Here’s the link, if you want to know what people are saying.
And here’s the link to buy. E-book or paperback. Amazon or Waterstones or Barnes & Noble, or indeed any good book store can order for you.
If you enjoy these Five-Minute Reads, I can guarantee you’ll enjoy A Midlife Holiday.
Thanks for reading.
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We were born before the wind ...
Those halcyon days we have shared memories x