Waxing and Waning
- Marie Laure
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- Mar 17
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 18
"Bye-Bye Miss American Pie"* was a song written and played incessantly on the radio in the early 1970's. The lyrics were so obscure that it was never clear to anyone what we were singing about. It didn't matter. Still doesn't, because the prophetic words evoked something about to be lost forever.
As the memory of a song fades, so with it goes an era. Were those better days? Well, compared with what? If we look at the Middle Ages with its Black Death and barbaric laws imposed from Church and State combined, the answer is yes. As compared with the US Civil War, when the homeland was ravaged by horrors? Again, yes. When we turn our eyes back to the 1960's, '70's, '80's, '90's it is easy for some of us to say those days were better than before, while waxing nostalgic.
Each generation,overlapping with the next, creates a narrative of our times, our lifetimes. Stories are unique, but a shared history places us in a particular time together. These are our times.
As I go about my daily life it is impossible to comprehend that while I take my seat at my writing desk, or, order my online groceries,( a habit since COVID), or, walk in the late afternoon, or play my piano, or text with my kids, or Zoom with my friends, or, rise at 3 am to see the full lunar eclipse (only chance in five years), or, sit in meditation in the evening, or, fill the car with gas, or, cook dinner, or sleep "perchance to dream", that these days are fast becoming the "good old days".
As I write, and as you read, we are on the precipice of plunging into a life and world order that shakes everything that has been the status quo for entire lifetimes.
Younger generations on the rise cannot know all that this implies. Others caught in the middle will have to scramble as the rug is pulled from under their planned trajectories. Those of us of a certain age, have the benefit and dread of hindsight. We understand our hard-won rights because we were there to fight for them. We know the truth of a segregated world because we saw school kids from one neighborhood get bussed to another. We still lament ill-fated decisions made by our government to send our able-bodied young friends to foreign countries to fight and die. We witnessed assassinations that fractured hope for freedom that some leaders dared to dream. Is this nostalgia for an America soon to be lost? Yes and no.
As compared with today, when we are living under the threat of a couple of greedy white men with tentacles reaching across borders while strangling those within our own, there is way too much normalcy in our daily living. Chicken Little is screaming his head off for us to look up to see the skywriting before it disappears.
Bye-Bye Miss American Pie . . .
No verdict was returned . . ."
But I knew I was out of luck the day the music died.