A wonderful, terrifying moment

I'm driving down the road, listening to the radio, enjoying this simple experience that has given me so much pleasure ever since the day I got my driver's license.

This song comes on the radio.



I know it very well, of course; it's been popular and out for a long time. 

I find myself singing along to the words.

Inside my head, the refrain feels real, appropriate, strong--I am young.  I burn with the energy of my youth.  The music ignites and engages that energy and my passions, as rock and roll has always done for me, and for a wonderful moment I am a young man singing along to music that speaks to his youth. 

But of course I am not young.  I am 58 years old, less than a third of a year away from turning 59.  My hair is mostly gray, my beard, white.  In the most optimistic moments I can wrangle, when I picture myself living as long as anyone in my ancestry has ever lived, I still have far fewer years ahead of me than behind me.  I have so much I want to do, so much passion, so much anger, so much love, so much of everything that I cannot possibly have so few years left, cannot possibly be so old, cannot possibly no longer be young.  Yet I am.  The terror of my oldness, of my mortality, hits me harder than any beating I have ever taken, and I have taken hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.

The moments--both the wonderful one and the terrifying one--pass.

I lift my hand to turn off the radio.

Fuck that. 

I return my hand to the steering wheel and let the song play on. 

I go back to singing along with it. 

I don't care that I am 58 years old.  I don't care that my hair is gray, my beard, white.  I am young inside.  You can call it delusion, or trying to turn back the clock, or stupid, or whatever.  I don't care. 

If I live to be a hundred, I hope songs still light the passions in me, bring back my youth, and leave me happily singing along with them.