Dearest A…,
Aah, how strange to be, sitting in Pacific Coffee, Mid-Levels, Hong Kong and listening to Laura Nyro singing Spanish Harlem…
A different time, a different rhyme and all transported around digitally but not coldly.. Not coldly at all…
With attendant hopes, vain, slightly dimming but not any less powerful as they dim.. perhaps growing more powerful as they take their strength and gumption from the salt that has collected by the evaporation of more innocent endeavours, more foolish, more naïve, more primal dreams and wishes. I sit here tapping away at these super slim, low action keys and am rhythmically reprimanded, constantly corrected for desiring the old Thinkpad keys, the old typewriter inspired deep drive and spring back, the old Olivettiesque snap to life, ribbon on paper…
Ribbon on paper! One shows one’s age (and how mercifully and thankfully I might add, on good days, on good days, but only on good days..), one shows one’s age and vintage by the things that capture one’s memories when one isn’t actively looking.
For I, like many, have allowed myself to be moulded by the times and the dusty winds of fortune and I have become but a shadow of that young boy and grown into someone no one could have expected. Especially not me… For somewhere along the way I lost the ability to see past 35 years old. That being the age at which I would die, kill myself, walk into the sea and drown…
Now, partnered and in my 50s and sitting tapping away at the shallow new keys of the 21st Century I am being forced to face myself and learn that the real reinventions only come with age…
So it is that I turn to old friends, friends I have known for a long time and still feel connected to.
It is good that one learns how to terminate telephone contracts after the event, it is good that one is still excited by new operating systems, it is good that one can decide to give music a rest after the longest time and turn to writing words (no matter how scary).. but it’s better when suddenly Madam Memory, and surreptitiously too, it’s better when she stoops over and whispers in our ears and our hearts and we can still suddenly say such as:
“Ribbon on paper… Olivettiesque and Laura Nyro… and Spanish Harlem..” even while sitting drinking sugar-free iced tea and unexpectedly feel a pang of pain and beauty even in Mid-Levels, even in Hong Kong.
For surely A…, there is no reinvention without pain, surely no pain without the possibility of beauty.
And always beauty.
Always beauty.