“It blows me away. I look in the mirror and I’m 24. I never got older than 24.”
The Beatle drummer Ringo Starr just turned 85.
He told the New York Times reporter Lindsay Zoladz about being 24 forever in a recent interview in Los Angeles.
Having been focused for so many years on my memoir, his comment got my attention.
I’m not sure about the mirror. When I look in the mirror I don’t see 24.
But if you have to give a number, what is it?
What if you didn’t know how to count?
How many of what?
Writing a memoir is an exercise in time-bending. A giant arc with an unknown beginning lost over the horizon and and unknown ending, and a lot in the middle that is not easily ordered or made sense of or remembered with any knowing accuracy. One learns the modesty of not insisting.
Trying to put numbers to it is impossible.
And so I kind of like Ringo’s 24.
Why not?
A good number, a good year probably. Wasn’t it?
How to choose?
As Ringo wrote, “You know it don’t come easy.”
“Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues,” he also wrote.
Good for a memoirist to remember, too.