I’m listening to Joan Baez sing Diamonds and Rust. “We both know what memories can bring ….” Perfectly nostalgic. I’m remembering my own “girl on the half-shell”. I have made it a policy not to regret, because, if you are paying attention, there are too many forks in the road to think one way “right.” But am I  ” so good with words and in keeping things vague”? (I like that vague is the french word for ‘wave’. So many so different, so many appear the same.)

Isn’t it curious in this sudden age, when youth is pricked with idealism and socialist dreams, that the folk music of the fifties and sixties isn’t washing back? It would be appropriate, because the old white guard is dreaming of the fifties, that patch of American history when “we” were mighty and clean and you could advertise beer on TV and smoke in bars. Black and white.

But Joan is singing “Flora, the Lily of the West” from the point of view of a man. Men wore their hair down their backs and sported colors of the rainbow. Of course the folks with Marine haircuts in that age cursed at those ‘perverted hippies.’ Why didn’t women wear god-given bras? Get a job, (because you could get a job even if you dropped out of school in eighth grade.) Hell, it was understood then that ‘some people’ were just designed by god to be hod carriers and ditch diggers, and others to rule the world. A woman should live in an apron and plunk out kids. No affirmative action. No Title 9. No ‘special education.’ And a population half as big as the one we have now with lots of people living on farms.

Imagine a day in which most of your day contains no media. None. Not even a radio playing hits in the background. It existed. So for me, as compared to my son and my grandkids, all media is an overlay. I could even call it an indulgence, no matter how much I might see the Web as a necessity.

A couple of winters ago we lost power for more than a week. Where I live that meant we lost heat, light, cooking, and plumbing. Switch off, and we were back three centuries. I had to go into the back yard with a large bucket and scoop water out of the pond to flush the loo. We heated some food with wood in the fireplace. We melted snow. Mostly we bundled up. Cell phones didn’t work well here in the woods. Across the river is a beautiful marsh that spreads out for several miles. Deer and turkeys regularly walk through the yard.

But this is no ShangriLa. Across the river is the shooting range where police from all over the county come to practice. Nearby is the huge complex that was the old state hospital for the insane. Now many who would have been there are homeless and sleep under bridges. From here I can see peeks of the graveyards where dozens were buried anonymously. Now they speak of putting up three hundred houses on the meadow next to it.

At any moment a passel of different kinds of broadcast waves are passing through my body: UHF, HF, cell phone (however funky), radio, perhaps LORAN, and then all the natural stuff the sun and stars are flinging at us.

Death. We are designed to be mortal. But we build myths about our immortality. That is what faith is about. Because those common beliefs about  escaping the biome, controlling the wind and water become partially true. But here’s the ironic contract. If we take over from wild Nature, then we are in charge of the chaos. We are responsible for the wind and water. And ourselves. If we stop death, triple our life expectancy, and spread to every corner of the planet and beyond, as no invasive species has ever done, then dammit, we own all the effects of taking over the process from Mom Nature.

I feel myself dying. That sounds macabre, but it is more prosaic than that. It is a simple reality that my sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, coordination, stamina and whatever else, is fading. It is. I can become partially bionic with glasses and hearing aids and pacemakers and approximate some of my old capability and perception, but it is not the same, of course. The world seen through glass and amplifiers is dulled. So, yes, even while walking in the woods I filter my experience through the media .

I don’t need to visit this filtered experience on those younger than I; nor is there real appeal in crying, “See, taste, feel, act, love now, while you can!”

You also cannot stop death from taking those you have loved (or hated). We can live heedlessly, sometimes. Virtually live the multiple lives available through screens. But stop, sometimes. Fully taste your own unique history; envision the early lives of your parents and grandparents. Swim in the nostalgia because it is also a gift. It adds flavor, even meaning, to now. Be present with the present but also with the past.

We have the gift of still knowing the feeling of that moment when we ran through the field of high grass, the new seeds whipping at our legs, jay-cry above us and the woods on the far horizon.