Capital Suffering
Seeking distraction recently, I happened upon a short video of Angus Young, co-founder and lead guitarist of the rock band AC/DC, doing his version of Chuck Berry’s duckwalk across the stage before a cheering crowd in Berlin. Young is now old. Yet he and his bandmates are on the road again, perhaps hoping that not only rock-and-roll, but rock-and-rollers, too, will never die. But they will. It is the way of all flesh.
Still, I couldn’t help a metaphorical tip of the proverbial hat to the little fellow, his stringy white hair flying about as he played, yet again, the same old songs he’s been grinding out for decades, though the old fingers no longer scramble up and down the fretboard as fast as they once did. Like too many boys of the 1980s, I went through an adolescent AC/DC phase, assuming, no doubt like the boys in the band, that as long as the music was loud and fast there would be no end to youth and health and vigor. Nearing sixty now, I see the evidence everywhere: that trifecta of blessedness is waning.
Descending the Stairs
For the past two years, I have been caring for my elderly mother, watching her slowly disappear, physically and mentally, before my eyes. She is 90 and suffers from cancer and dementia. When I agreed to care for her, none of us thought she would still be with us two years hence. Her body has declined noticeably over the past six months. She is now under 80 pounds, cannot walk, and it’s become almost impossible for her to articulate coherent speech. Yet she lingers.
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Thomas Jay writes from the Valley of the Sun in Arizona. He is the Curriculum Consultant in the West at Memoria Press.
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