Greenwich Village, Friday Night

10:00 p.m., Friday night, Greenwich Village, New York City, and I’m in my hotel room, drinking Scotch and watching baseball on TV. This is my vacation life in my 60s. Yes, I was out earlier for dinner (easier to get a table when you’re one of the only ones out) and even caught one set of blues at a club on Bleecker Street (unfettered front row at the bar). But that was overlapping the after-work crowd. The set began at 7:00. Most all of the under-60 (and still alive) were just venturing out tonight when I was on my way up the stairs, searching for my key. “I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.” My back aches. I walked a lot today, through SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown, down to Ground Zero, and near it, appropriately enough, the Occupy Wall Street protesters. There but for 40 years go I. Merely an onlooker today, I envied the young drummers and dancers and sign-carrying chanters. They’re chided for not having any specific demands or proposals. But they’re protesters, not proposers. They’re protesting corruption in government and the economy, the influence of money on the government, the widening gap between rich and poor, the economic inequality in general in this country, in the world. Sometimes it’s enough to just say, “Enough!” They are righteous and idealistic and hopeful and certain and horribly naïve. They are surrounded and confined by police – barriers and cars and horseback – and granite buildings of government and finance. They can’t last, they can’t overcome. Any more than my generation did. I wish they could because they’re surely right. But so were we. But now we’re on vacation in Greenwich Village, drinking Scotch and watching baseball on TV, and going to bed early. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”