Old man, look at my life, 24 and there’s so much more
That line has always stuck with me.
Before I was 24, the ‘so much more’ seemed a long way into the future; I awaited the arrival of my worldly wisdom.
At 24, I basked in the extreme relevance of the words as I trod university halls in the weekends and walked to work along the waterfront during the week.
Post-24, I mourned the loss of the song’s applicability to me; now without a landmark, I was simply lumped in with the rest in the ‘so much more’ .
Now, when I listen to it, it’s a combination of all these moments, plus the eternally possible ‘more’.
A close relative of this line has to be James Taylor’s “with ten miles behind me, and ten thousand more to go,” describing a journey in Sweet Baby James. They both have a sense of contracted expansiveness, of half-cynical, half-optimistic horizon-gazing.
© May Guise’s wundiverse, 2012
