…never say now…

…someday I’ll be 18…

KataniaArt

The Canadian singer Bryan Adams had a hit song (1996) published in an album with the same title, 18 Til I Die.

It starts out “Wanna be young the rest of my life

Never say now, try anything twice.”

Later on, he sings, “Someday I’ll be 18 goin’ on 55,”

And later, “gonna be 18 ’til I die.”

The novelist and memoirist Haruki Murakami mentions the song in one of his books and says he thinks it means the singer will live to be18, he’ll be 18 and out.

I think something different. I think it means the songwriter wants never to lose his child-like nature. Bryan Adams was heading for forty when he recorded the song, and while it isn’t necessarily a autobiographical piece, I do lean away from Murakami’s interpretation on that account.

The reason I feel some kinship with the song is because when you’re working on a memoir, as I am, the years tend to get smudgier and smudgier as you work your way through them, whether chronologically or not.

In a memoir, the writer is always looking through a lens that can be not only often unreliable, clouded by the cataracts of imperfect memory, but also what the lens is focused on is something like a mesa with so many layers of sandstone deposited over so many years. In the case of actual sandstone, the layers can accumulate over millions of years.

One lifetime, as Nabokov so famously said in Speak, Memory (maybe borrowing from Thomas Carlyle) is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness, much shorter than those sandstone years.

Still, it’s all that sandstone that calls out to me, 18 goin’ on 55, all those water currents and wind, and binding of the grains and weight of the upper layers pressing on the layers below. It seems chronological, one layer upon another, and it is as it accumulates, but later, as it bends with time and unpredictable forces, it can be viewed from so many angles.

What is 18 going on 55?

What is 42 going on 78?

What is 80 going on 30?

As we interact with one another in the moment — whether with someone we know well, or someone we don’t know well at all — we do not think of those sandstone layers, of the smudginess of the years. It would be too complicated, really impossible.

But Bryan Adams’ idea is maybe a good one to keep in mind. We are all of us multilayered, getting older one day at a time, or three, or none, getting younger 18 years at a time, or 55, or 7, the wind blowing, the rain falling, for each of us in a different way.

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