i had an image we were talking about celebrating birthdays and people wanted to know if i wanted a birthday party and i said i dont know if i want a birthday party because birthdays are a little bit like being in a falling elevator and celebrating at every floor you fall and then i thought about this again and i realized id only thought about this since i got to be thirty because when i was a real little guy i always thought of getting older as an ascension you know how you have a different image of getting older when youre a kid how you cant wait i remember i was sitting on a stoop with about five other little kids and we mustve been somewhere between three and five us sitting out having a conference on a stoop in brooklyn trying to decide how old we want to be being three or four or five between three and five all of and were because nobodys content its a bad time you dont want to be first of all everybody else is too tall always looking up and you get a crick in your neck from it play stickball yet with the older kids in the street you know youre you cant its not a good time youre too dependent somebodys always got to take you across the street and thats a drag and you cant drink coffee or they wont let you i actually had an aunt who snuck me coffee and it was like being free for a minute she was my favorite aunt i lived with her and my grandmother and three other aunts in this house with a covered porch and a stoop and thats what i remember thats where we were sitting having this conference on aging and one kid said oh id like to be thirteen sounded like a real good powerful male age boys but im not even sure of that that i think all the kids were and one said id like to be fifteen and everybody agreed that was good and then somebody said twenty-one and one said eighteen no we said thats too old it takes two words to say it we knew twenty-one was over the hill ballistic idea like the trajectory of a shell till you reached a certain point so we already had this you went up for a while and then you came down because even then we knew that whatever goes up also comes down and we had some sense of the failing of our powers at twenty-two and we would no longer be the same happy cute kids at the age of twenty-two thats the view we had then and ive had several different views of this since then sometimes ive seen the movement of time as something like a carousel
12 02 16
Antin, i never knew what time it was
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i never knew what time it was
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p. 97–99