TERRY MOSHER
It’s strange to get old – for numerous of reasons. I had been struggling with those reasons until I started listening to Thelonious Monk on American Routes this past weekend.
First, I must tell you that I am a jazz kind of guy. I started out in the 1940s with Swing Music, moved on to country with Hank Williams and guys like Ernie Tubbs and Webb Pierce and continued on with Doo Wop and to Jazz, which was getting squeezed out of the mainstream in the early 1950s by Doo Wop.
Somewhere in my early college years I discovered Monk – and did not like him. He was just too weird. His music didn’t seem to connect, which I have lately discovered was his point.
And now I like it. Which seems weird, but really isn’t because I find as I have aged that I change. What I once liked, now I don’t. What I once disliked, now I do like. I was that way with Duke Ellington. Man, I couldn’t stand his stuff, and it really got bad for me while a student at Western Washington in the early 1960s and Ellington did a two-hour show at Sam Carver Gym that I found boring. And when his two hours was up, he got up – and left. Just like that.
But, again, as I have aged I have come to love Duke’s music. He was an incredible composer. His Black and Tan Fantasy gives me goose bumps.
Most people misunderstood Monk (Know spelled backwards) and as he aged (and got sick) he didn’t understand why his jazz critics didn’t understand. Now, of course, he is revered by many 32 years after his death at the age of 64.
I think it’s a natural progression that we shut down as we age. We shut down and we get shut out from the mainstream, and I don’t know which comes first. I know that the young generation is far removed from me and me from it. One of my granddaughters was over the other day and she and our teenage daughter started a riff on some trendy thing that doubled them over with laughter while I sat there wondering sour faced what was going on.
I have for months been pouring over Facebook posts and I get about half of what is written by friends. I get depressed because I don’t understand, so I may have to give Facebook up in order to save my sanity (what is left of it).
Really, I think all of this is normal. I look at life as you would look at a lateral scale that goes from zero (being a baby) to 100 (being 100 or close to it). As we age we move across that scale and at about halfway (50) comes a mid-life crisis, and then the last 50 moves are all downhill as we slide away from the mainstream, which cuts out about at 70.
When we reach social security age we usually are retired and moving into a different element, and away from that mainstream. I have, or have had, neighbors that reached and passed 90, and they definitely have slid way past the mainstream. Too old to be mobile, they sit and wait for the Grim Reaper. Some are sad that they now longer are thought of as a community leader, in fact no longer thought of period.
I remember years ago coming across one of those former community leaders and he stopped me to say that he no longer had a reason to live. His wife was gone, his job was long gone, and he was all alone and felt it. He wanted to die.
So when Thelonious Monk gave up performing his music magic years before he died, I can now understand why. He was not understood and no longer fit in the square peg his critics wanted him to fit. He had more to say through his music, but he no longer felt he was relevant. So he quit. Then died.
Equally sad is that as I age, some of the people around me don’t. Losing Elton Goodwin at 63 was a big one for me. My sister dyiing thee yeas ago was huge. My best friend being taken by a heart attack two years ago slammed me pretty good.
The human race is a like a flower. Seed is planted and it sticks its green neck out of the ground. It grows and blossoms and then falls back, wilts and dies. Then a new flower replaces it, and the cycle starts all over again.
I’m in the wilting stage.
What is tough for me, and maybe it’s just me, but I don’t like it when people who die are quickly forgotten. Again, that is normal, but I don’t like it. Twenty years from now nobody will remember me. Maybe 10 years. But it is the way it is. We come, we stay for a while, then we leave and others take our place, only to repeat the process.
The good thing, I guess, is that we have the music of Monk and Ellington and the others. They left something behind. But many of us do not. We leave and the world spins on just as well or even better.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.
