This Morning

Image by Caleb George

This morning I saw two men doing things I can no longer do if I ever could.  At least, not the way they were doing.  Of course, both men were younger – younger than I (most everyone is) – not young.

The difference between younger and young is younger is the recognition of having been young once without the regret you no longer are; in fact, there is some degree of relief, for now you can get on with whatever it is you’re getting on with without that bit-in-the -mouth panic of a colt. You’ve been there and done that – you know better, both in the knowing and the doing. You no longer cry over spilled milk.

These men were not taking their time, but they were not wasting it, either.  They certainly were taking less time than I could to pump a bicycle up Primrose Hill or run full speed up Beachwood Drive.

Primrose Hill is neither prim nor rosy; it is an ass-suck incline even to walk. I know Primrose from experience, both from having walked it often and running up it once, barefoot and drunk after a run without shoes down Woodrow Wilson Drive to Cahuenga, over the bridge above Highway 101, down Cahuenga again to Odin to Holly to Primrose and then UP and down, and UP Beachwood to home. My wife loved me, for she didn’t throw me out of the house. But she did make me sleep in the other room.

I may go barefoot on occasion, now, and have one drink more than good sense would otherwise dictate, but I do not run prim-rosed hills without shoes (a euphemism for an old-man jog), and certainly not primed.

Beachwood Drive is a seemingly simple slant whose simplicity decreases in proportion to the effort you have made to fill its unforgiving distance unless you are a runner who decreases difficulty with the increase of your effort.

I have floated effortlessly up Beachwood Drive, awed more by the floating than the slant I was floating over.  I walk it now. Rapidly. There is a difference in rapidly, but it feels the same.

Primrose Hill and Beachwood Drive are indelible geographies of the men who traversed them in their time as I did in mine. I admire them, not for their younger prowess but for their having to choose what they did.

Hopefully, they will appreciate being younger rather than young as I appreciate being older rather than old.