BECOMING FIFTY YEARS

I am turning forty-nine in few days’ time. Being almost fifty I can feel it in my body and bones. I am surely growing older. In my days it was Pink-Floyd and Bob Marley, it was The Doors and Bob Dylan. My hair was long and I wore jeans and T-Shirts, and the truth be told my wardrobe hasn’t changed much. At the movies there was Rocky and Rambo, Star Wars and Star Trek. Some guys used mousse in their hair and dried it with a hairdryer to get the desired style. It was the dress and the talk of the eighties and nineties.  You used to go to Disco’s and drink and dance to bands like Pet Shop Boys and Boom Boom Room and the city was a blur of human activity and strobe lights. The streets were black as night with cars driving by occasionally shining their bright headlights in and endless race with time and human existence. The life in the city was as alive and bustling then as it is today. But in that time the river of three decades has flowed passed and I am much older. Yet the same life that flowed in that city and all of us thirty years ago still flows on unstopped in front of my window as the cars race by. The same battle for survival in suburbia and the concrete jungle wages on unchanged. They are all dreamers who could not catch what they were chasing all those years ago and who cannot catch it still. Still they go on pursuing their dreams and hopes in that endless quest for the water that would quench their thirst for life and all of their aspirations beyond. It is a picture of city life that is universal and timeless and was probably the same in Ancient Rome. Somehow the bigger picture overwhelms us and we become just so many minions and pawns enslaved by a greater monster of our own making. It has the pulse to keep us who are its blood flowing; keeping the body ever alive. Much like ants in and anthill that operate as a living whole; and who function as one organism. That city is still very much alive out there as I sit here in my room writing. I am older but the living city around me is still in its infancy. And so life will go on unchanged long after I am gone, and now my life is merely a brief dream in and ocean of human miracles that flows on unceasingly for what higher purpose we do not know. The trains pull in and out of their stops and the traffic bustles on at peak hour. We have our suppers and retire to our beds with a roof over our heads. As long as the city lives; we live, and the blood of law and dollars keeps us alive. Fifty years later it is the same as ever and for what time is left for me I intend to enjoy it. Dreams are there for living.