A Colored Memory

I know I am growing old. Not 'old' as in 'senile', but 'old' as in 'putting on years'. And I actually don't have a problem with it. I sometimes crib and rant about it but then that's because at that moment I might have seen a momentary advantage in being younger. But in the long run, I think growing old actually has more advantages. They say you grow wiser as you grow older. So there you go. Doesn't matter if you are really wise or not, you can claim wisdom if you have the sagging skin and a bald pate ringed with dirty hair that used to be silver. And you can demand respect because of your age. Try doing that when you are fifteen! These are just a sample of the advantages that aging automatically bestows upon us. So, to reiterate, I don't have a problem with growing old.

But then that is not what I have been thinking about. My thought is about quite something else. I was born in the previous century and as I have aged along with the flow of time, I have experienced a whole lot of things that, thinking back, I don't experience anymore. Things like listening to the sparrows chirp in the mornings, watching ducks in the makeshift, rainwater pond behind the house and chasing butterflies in the garden are mere distant memories. I am not sure of this but I think it is because of the change in the century and what they called the Y2K bug.

The whole spiel about aging and growing old fits into context here because when something happens to trigger one of these memories, the black and white, spinning spiral puts in its customary appearance to take me back to the past. And once I come back from that trip down Reminiscence Boulevard, I end up feeling old. I am writing all this because that's what happened today. I saw something on the way from office that triggered off the whole sequence of events. I kept turning around in my seat to keep it in my sight and was, at the same time, traveling back in time to figure out when I had last seen it, what I had learnt about it and the stories I had heard about it. And ridiculously enough, I wondered if I should look forward to the pot of gold at the end, since it looked like I was headed that way.

Today, I saw a full, semi-circular rainbow.