From Where I Sit

By Pat Spilseth, Columnist

Remember the song “Yesterday, When I was young”?   A friend recently sent a recording of the song on my computer.  Today I listened to the recording and remembered…  How perfect the timing: tomorrow is my birthday.  

I am no longer young. 

How fast the time flies by.  How many days I waste with nothingness.  But that’s part of life, spending time just being, discovering more about who we are as individuals. 

“When I was young” is a song with a counter-cultural theme released in early 1967 by Eric Burdon and The Animals.  It was written by five of the band members.  Lots of memories.

Read the lyrics. Better still, listen to a recording of the song.  And remember back through the many years of your youth, middle age and steps into these senior years…  Treasure all those moments when you were younger and, hopefully, plan for many more moments of glory in our senior years.  

Yesterday, when I was young

The taste of life was sweet

Like rain upon my tongue

I teased at life as if

It were a foolish game

The way an evening breeze

Would tease a candle flame

The thousand dreams I dreamed

The splendid things I planned

I always built to last

On weak and shifting sand

I lived by night and shunned

The naked light of day

And only now I see

How the years have ran away

Yesterday, when I was young

There were so many songs

That waited to be sung

So many wild pleasures

That lay in store for me

And so much pain my dazzled eyes

refused to see

I ran so fast that time

And youth at last ran out

I never stopped to think

What life was all about

And every conversation That I can

recall

Concerns itself with me

And nothing else at all

Yesterday, the

moon was blue

And every crazy

day

Brought some thing new to do

And I used my

magic age

As if it were a wand

And never saw the waste

And emptiness beyond

The game of love I played

With arrogance and pride

And every flame I lit

So quickly, quickly died

The friends I made all seemed

Somehow to drift away

And only I am left

On stage to end the play

Yesterday, when I was young

There were so many songs

That waited to be sung

So many wild pleasures

That lay in store for me

And so much pain my dazzled eyes

refused to see

There are so many songs in me that

won’t be sung

I feel the bitter taste

Of tears upon my tongue

And The time has come for me

To pay for yesterday

When I was young.

How sweet to remember the years growing up in Glenwood on Lake Minnewaska, the joys and traumas of youth, traveling the country and abroad, driving my silver Miata with the red racing stripe, creating boutique shops named “next”, marriage, two great kids and grandchildren, living in Minnesota on the lake and enjoying friendships with many different personalities.   Oh, the stories everyone will have at our class reunion this weekend! I hope we’ll still recognize each other.  After all, it’s been sixty years!

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To contact Pat, email: pat.spilseth@gmail.com.