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I grow old…I
grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
J. Alfred Prufrock
When I became a man
I put away childish things
Apostle Paul
I Grow Old
By David
Bunch
August 8, 2005
When I was in
college, I had a student job with the Coastal Fisheries Department where I
stared through a microscope and sorted fish larvae in a converted dorm known as
the Plankton Lab. My boss was a thirty-something named Cory. Apparently, this
guy came of age during the roughly two to three week period when disco was
popular. I know this because during the long, grueling afternoons while we
watched the clock and listened to the current hits from Hootie and the
Blowfish, Jewel, or Counting Crows, Cory would frequently stop
working, look at the radio and yell, “play disco!” Then, he would push back in
his chair and do a disco move that can best be described as Karate Kid meets
John Travolta. On the off chance that the dj did play "The Disco Duck" (it did
actually happen once), Cory was ecstatic and quite incoherent for several
minutes. The end of the song was greeted with a short but entertaining story of
exactly where Cory was and what he was doing the first time he ever heard the
song. We would laugh politely and turn up "Only Wanna Be With You."
While observing
someone forever attached to their era of time was quite entertaining at age 18,
now, ten years later, I find it has happened to me. You have no idea how much it
hurts to admit this. Just a couple of weeks ago I broke out my old dcTalk CDs.
I'm not talking just "Jesus Freak." I mean da-da-down with tha dcTalk, yeaah
boy, dropping-a-funky-beat dcTalk. It was so good that I could not enjoy it by
myself. I cranked it up on the way to church and smiled contentedly as my
thirteen-year-old niece heard, for the first time I think, "2 Honks and a
Negro." I'm not sure she appreciated it.
J. Alfred
Prufrock mutters the enigmatic phrase, "I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the
bottoms of my trousers rolled" in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock"1. An "almost" minor in English, several outstanding
professors, and a couple of books have never offered up a satisfactory
explanation of this phrase. But recently the meaning has occurred to me.
Prufrock is stuck in the glorious days of his now distant youth. Apparently,
when he was a young man it was fashionable to wear one's trousers rolled, and
Prufrock, with all of life's mystery and tragedy behind him, found a comfort in
returning to the good days. If Prufrock had lived in the 80s, he would have worn
his jeans tight rolled, sported an Ocean Pacific t-shirt, and skated a
fat-on-the-edges-narrow-in-the-middle skateboard. He now looks down and realizes
that he is a man forever doomed to live the era in which he came of age and has
no choice but to embrace it.
But the Apostle
Paul has a different take when addressing this dilemma in I Corinthians. He
says, "When I became a man, I put away childish things"2. Paul seems
to have identified that ubiquitous characteristic that all human beings possess:
the desire to cling to that which is familiar and nostalgic to us. However, he
is exhorting us not to stay ensconced in our past, nor to hold on to what is
trendy or fashionable in the present. Those things will all pass off the scene
and will be replaced by the next fad du jour. Rather, Paul challenges us to ever
push forward and grow upward in our life in Christ. The Kingdom life is a
journey, and we must forget those things that are behind and press forward3
to the abundance of God's riches that are ever before us and never stale to us.
The God who makes all things new has something that is always fresh and exciting
and full of glorious surprise for us at every turn.
I'm going to
place my yesterdays behind me and greet each new day as an exciting adventure
full of new possibilities and new surprises that God has in store for me.
Oh, and I'm
also going to rip my dcTalk cds to my mp3 player.
ninetyandnine.com
© 2005, David Bunch
---------
David Bunch
appreciates where he came from and remains excited about where he is going.
-
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S.
Eliot, An Introduction to Poetry, X.J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia, 1994, pg 337
-
I Corinthians 13:11
-
Philippians 3:13-14
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