On embracing the winter years

Batavia, New York

I sit in hospice at the bedside of my beloved Aunt Jane — who never let us use the honorific, as “Aunt” made the perennially youthful Jane feel old — and the jukebox in my mind plays its saddest song: “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention.

Jane, who is eighty-nine and till a few weeks ago looked twenty-five years younger, was my hip and happening aunt of the 1960s who lived in Buffalo and dated pro athletes and bopped along to WKBW’s Top 40. She taught my brother and me to write letters, which is why I still have an autographed photo of Minnesota Vikings kicker Fred Cox, and my brother has his signed picture of Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel.

I remind her of these things, but the part of Jane that forms words can no longer respond. I don’t know where the time has gone.

What a week. The other night, three buddies and I went to see Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore blow the roof off the Sportsmens Tavern in Buffalo. I saw Alvin in Santa Barbara back in 1986, when the guitar virtuoso of the Blasters played with members of X in the punk-folk supergroup the Knitters.

Rock and roll never forgets?

I dunno. Gray and white hairs outnumbered hairs of color by 10-1 at the Sportsmens. As seventy-nine-year-old Jimmie Dale Gilmore said, looking out over the crowd, “There’s a lot of old people here who are younger than me.”

I thought back to when in my thirties I took a young friend to a Social Distortion concert as a high-school graduation present. I’d seen Social D a decade or so earlier. They had moved on, thematically, from their early sonic mayhem, but at the later show they dropped in a few chestnuts like “Mommy’s Little Monster” for the enjoyment of the older set, rather as a wedding band will dutifully churn out Kool & the Gang for the parents and grandparents while the kids smile indulgently.

That young friend is now fifty.

Dave and Jimmie Dale still echoed in my ears the following night, when Lucine and I hosted the twenty-eighth-annual October evening of readings from my town’s most famous (I didn’t say “best”) writer, John Gardner. For ninety minutes a couple dozen of us read and listened to excepts from Gardner’s mammoth corpus, and then into the wee hours we drank and laughed and basked in the warmth of the wonderful friendships that have developed over the years.

Only two of us are under sixty. No one is under forty.

I can’t help noticing that the local talks and shows I attend or help organize are populated almost exclusively by those who are, shall we say, shuffling into their Buddy Ebsen years.

This isn’t necessarily a recent phenomenon: upon our repatriation thirty-plus years ago, Lucine and I joined the historical society and were about the only non-AARP members at the monthly dinners.

We used to laugh at the delighted reaction of the old-timers to our presence: “Ooh, young people!”

Now we have become them.

So I wonder: where are all the kids, and why don’t they like to do the things I like to do?

I feel silly typing that — like some doddering dotard in the 1970s scanning the audience for vernal shoots at a show by the Count Basie Orchestra.

A friend, an Eastern poet and comrade given to melancholy turns, wrote me recently: “The problem with being a rural localist is that we are terribly isolated. Speaking now just for myself, I think we invested a lot in the thought that our small examples of things going right would spawn others.”

It really doesn’t pay to think too much on such things.

When I was a kid I assumed there must be a Batavia underground consisting of Main Street bohemians who met in secret to watch early Seventies cult movies (Payday, The Hired Hand, Scarecrow) and discuss the sort of authors — Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Bratigan, Hunter S. Thompson — that appealed to fifteen-year-old me. (I don’t mean to dismiss these writers in retrospect; I still esteem Slaughterhouse-Five and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.)

Then I grew up. My wife and I moved back here and I realized no, there is not and probably never was such a thing, but that doesn’t matter. “Build soil,” as Robert Frost said. Something may come of it.

God willing, there will be a twenty-ninth-annual Gardner Reading, and by then, God willing, Jane will be young again, all ears and with her up-for-anything smile.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2025 World edition.