It’s a Wonderful Life
Dear friend,
I can hear the rumble of a neighbour’s wheelie bin trundling along someplace in the near distance, to the right of where I sit.
Chiara sneezes in the kitchen.
The loudest noise is the sound of the keys on my laptop. As I tune into the quiet, going deeper, I hear a neighbour’s cough. The sirens at this time of the day are in a lull.
It was one of the things I noticed when we moved here, eight years ago. There’s very little traffic. In our old part of town, the local drivers had a habit of driving over the speed bumps in the road at speed. The scraping of their cars’ metal bellies on the tarmac humps punctuated the day and the night.
I like the quiet, in this last hour of daylight before the sun dips behind the rooftops and the trees. A pigeon coos, while its friends dismantle our neighbour’s roof.
We’re going to listen to Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, a disciple of Ravi Shankar, this evening at the Barbican Centre in town. His name means world charmer, or charmer of the world. It was one of Luke’s suggestions. I’m looking forward to it.
Luke is an old friend Chiara is extremely fond of.
I’ll not dwell too much on the journey Luke and I have been on in this life. For a time we were almost like a married couple—at least it seemed that way to me, back in our twenties, when our lives were so intertwined it was hard for me to make a decision without wondering what he’d make of it.
Your peers become so incredibly important when you enter your teens and twenties—and I guess thirties too. It’s odd to look back now because when we were young that way, we thought it would last forever.
There’s that scene in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life when George and Mary are coming home from a soaking at the high school ball and George isn’t getting the point that Mary is in love with him.
He’s talking and talking, and an older guy on his balcony overhears it and gets frustrated. He says something like, “For heaven’s sake, why don’t you just kiss her!”
And George still doesn’t get it.
The guy throws down his newspaper and says, “Ah, youth is wasted on the young!”
Well, I wouldn’t really agree with that, but I get what he means.
I wouldn’t want to be twenty again—not for long—but it might be fun for a night. Imagine a club night where everyone brings along and lets loose their twenty-year-old self. That would be an interesting social experiment.
Staying young at heart, though—that’s available to everyone.
Open.
Curious.
Playful.
When you’re going through tough times, which many people are right now, one of the first things to go is your sense of humour. It’s a litmus test of sorts. The key is awareness.
How long has it been since I laughed along at myself—at the foolish wants and needs that can seem so important when the false self has surreptitiously slid over into the driving seat and taken hold of the wheel?
The silence is lifting.
Cars swoosh down the road, a sound system pulses, and the light is beginning to go.
Later we’ll bundle up against the cold and step out into the night.
I’ll let you know how the concert goes.
Till tomorrow.
Love,
Mikey