‘The Old, Old Silver Clock . . .’

I’m unsettled as I write this morning. It’s my 69th birthday, and for the first time in my life, I’m feeling old, and I’m not certain why. 

Nothing is really different today than yesterday: My beard and what’s left of my hair were as gray yesterday as they are today; the fine wrinkles on my hands that bothered me when I first noticed them a few years ago are no more pronounced this morning than they were when I went to bed last night; the few ailments that I’ve gathered in the past ten years or so are no more severe this morning than they were yesterday. 

So, what is it about this morning that makes me feel old? Birthdays can do that, I guess, although this is the first time that adding another candle to the figurative cake has bothered me. Fifty didn’t bother me, although the Texas Gal had been teasing me for a few years when something physical challenged me, saying “You’re almost fifty, you know.” Nor did sixty bother me, even though the teasing had become  “You’re almost sixty, you know,” some years before that.

Of course, the teasing has recently become “You’re almost seventy, you know.” And there, as I type, is the answer to this morning’s malaise: “almost seventy.” That number just sounds old, and I think that my contemplating it this morning – as I end my sixty-ninth trip around the planet and being my seventieth – is what makes me feel old. 

So, as I so often do, I’ll take how I feel and find music for it. And the answer this morning is a song I’ve known for more than fifty years, a tune called “Old Folks” when I came across it on John Denver’s 1970 album Whose Garden Was This. Written in its original French by Jacques Brel, Gérard Jouannest and Jean Corti and then translated by Mort Shuman, it’s a disarming and melancholy piece of work. 

Denver’s cover was the first version I heard of the song, but I heard it more frequently during the college year I spent in Denmark, as one of the albums frequently popped into the tape player in the lounge was Michael Johnson’s 1973 album There Is A Breeze, which features the song. I didn’t think of it at the time (how could I? I was twenty) but today there seems something sadly incongruent about our being so young and listening almost daily to a song about growing older than we could then imagine. 

I don’t think I’m as old yet as the folks in the song are, but I certainly understand the song much more now than I did when I heard it in the lounge almost fifty years ago:

– whiteray