Eras

I saw a YouTube video titled, "Man in Nursing Home Reacts To Hearing Music From His Era." The title made me ask, "What is my era? Do I have an era? Does everyone have an era?"

Maybe "my era" is the era of Old Time Rock & Roll music (think Tom Cruise in Risky Business). Or maybe my era began with the Beatles. No, it can't be any of those because music is timeless.

Many years ago, I spent a winter in an unheated cabin on a lake in western North Carolina. I had no TV, only an AM radio. The little cabin had no heat, and every morning the faucets would be frozen. A glass of water left on a table would freeze overnight. In the mornings I would step into a sheet metal shower stall and only a trickle of water would come out of the frozen water valves. I had to stand there while the trickle of water melted the ice in the valves so that water could flow. I slept on a sofa under an electric blanket set to high, with several more blankets piled on top of it. Good times.

But late at night, that old AM radio tuned in WBZ in Boston, Massachusetts. WBZ was a 50,000 watt clear-channel station and I had no trouble receiving it at night. I listened to Larry Glick do some great interviews and play some great music. If you missed Larry Glick, you missed a radio gem. There are things that are impossible to describe; things of which people will say, "You had to be there." The Larry Glick show was one of those things. Think of American Graffiti and Wolfman Jack broadcasting from a high-power Mexican station and you'll have a sense of what I mean.

I suppose my era was an era of transition, because so many things were in transition at that time. Technology was in transition. Culture was in transition. I was in transition. I was preparing to take a journey across the United States, twice. From central Virginia across the northern states to Seattle and down the Pacific Coast Highway to L.A., then east across the southern deserts and back to Virginia—via Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where I stayed a few weeks and studied Transcendental Meditation. I drove through the Great Plains where there seemed to be nothing but flat grassland to the horizon. I suppose the winter I spent in western North Carolina and that trip around America signaled a transition—the end of one era and the beginning of another.

How many eras does a person get to have? I was a child, I was a teenager, I was a young man, and so on, each era having its own priorities, its own memories. I'm coasting now—not trying to set fire to the world, not trying to invent the next gee-whiz gadget. Some would call it running out of runway, but that is as it should be. 

If I had to summarize my life in one word, that word would be learning. I came here to learn, and I've learned a few things but, I think, fewer than I should have, but with luck—with luck—it will be enough, it will be sufficient. I will tell you a secret, to believe or disbelieve, to do with as you please. Here it is: When you die, when you pass on from this world, you will meet the Angel. The Angel will review your life with you, the "good" things and the "bad" things, and then the Angel will ask you, "What have you done that is sufficient?" Try to have a good answer.