I should have been born in 1922.

I promise I'll stop writing these awful flowery-fiction bits. At least God has given me a small insight into my future: it's not in fiction. Now if only he could just blurt out which one it is.


I should have been born in 1926.

Maybe I would have been born on April 22nd, the same day Charles Mingus was born. Mongo Santamaria was born a week or two earlier. Judy Garland and Charles Shultz were born later that year. Flutists will be able to appreciate that I'd be the same age as Jean-Piere Rampal. Pope Benedict XV died and was succeeded by Pius XI. Women were able to vote! Ghandi was at work (in the form of being imprisoned for sedition), as were the rising Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini. Politics might have been ominous (or maybe it only appears so in the modern lens), but American music was starting to simmer. Louis Armstrong started playing with King Oliver, Kid Ory started recording. Irving Berlin and George Gershwin were both writing, but they waited to become great until I was a bit older. Massenet, Hindmouth and Stravinsky were writing new stuff too.

People still had kids back then. And they lived in small houses, and they didn’t make much money. The depression would have hit when I was a child. What a great gift! Self-imposed mortification is always done so half-heartedly. Maybe not having food, cloths and such would have served to increase my attachment to them, but hopefully not. My parents would have been smart: God provides, and when you think he doesn’t he’s really just providing in a different area. Cheap entertainment would have been a necessity, idleness being seen correctly: somewhere between the “all idleness corrupts” philosophy of the late 1800s and the inactivity of the hippies. The sound of the family radio might have filled the small living room many nights. TVs would have been unreasonably abhorred by my family. I have no reason to feel the way I do about TVs now. Newspapers were still read back then too. And books. Lots of books. I could bought E.E. Cumming's poetry the day it hit the shelves. And F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T.S. Elliot. It might have become incumbent upon me to somehow incorporate single letters into my name, since using your first name in it’s entirety was so out of style. Instead of the Border's book shelf being filled with Maya Angelou (word, Abecedaries), E.E. Cummings, and would have filled the shelves. You can buy a book for than the cost of a movie ticket, and it gives you hours of entertainment and learning. Movies give you 2 hours (the first and last half hour are filler anyways). I’m reluctant to call modern movies as a whole entertaining, enjoyable or anything of that nature. Not so when I would have been a kid though. Movies were art.

I would have been drafted into WWII (after lying about my age). Despite being a skilled saxophonist I would have thought playing music was sissy, and that I was drafted to shoot. My love would have been dismayed, but she would have sent me beautifully written letters while I was over seas. Women had beautiful handwriting back then. Now girls stylize it so much you can hardly read it. An "S" mind as well be a "l" and a "r" looks just like a "v". But not when I would have been 18: women wrote in beautiful cursive. I would have gotten back in '45 or '46. We would have married soon after. CS Lewis' writings would have come to me when I was about 20: if I was confused about God, he would have set me straight. Probably wouldn't have been: moral degradation seems to be a modern invention. Ugly churches, lame priests and "praise music" too. People got married at 20 back then. And they didn't have to go to college to avoid unemployment or mindless manual labor. I could have done very well for myself without spending 4 years at an institution, whether it be one of higher learning or mindless occupation (the line is now quite blurred).

My children would have enjoyed groups like "The Cadillac’s". They might have seen "The Sound Of Music" on their first date. My son would have opened the car door for his date (a 1957 Mercury Monterey. He had to wait until his senior prom to drive dad's car, a black 1956 Thunderbird). She would have said “thank you” too. Men hold doors today and women stick out their arms (they apparently are worried the man might forget their is a women passing through the doorway and in their forgetfulness allow the door to shut in their face). Probably all feminism at work. They don't need men to hold doors open for them. Back then feminists were real women who wanted respect, not these jokes of women who devalue themselves constantly by trying to be men. The kind of women who get treated wrong and say “I think very highly of myself, and I’m not going to marry you if you act like an idiot”, and the boy is scared into knowing what’s what. Nope, my son’s girlfriend would have been a real woman. Maybe they would have danced to Elvis. I wouldn’t have revolted like the rest of society. The same ridiculousness surrounded jazz musicians, all of whom I would have liked as a kid. I would have been justifiably critical of many groups inability to play a 4/4 ballad though. The relentless presence of pulsing triplets would have unnerved me.

I would be 70 years old right now. I’d be old enough to embrace the modern world correctly. Too often kids today cling to their iPods, televisions, computers, cell phones and all the rest thinking that it will make them happy. I would have lived 70 miserable years knowing where true happiness consists before any of the “revolutionary advances” of the modern world. I would probably sit and read books all day. I would have grown up when the church still spoke Latin, so I’d study Latin too. If my wife were to die before me I’d have a requiem mass is Latin said for her soul. I would go to daily mass also, but unlike the wonderful old men and women at daily mass these days I would refuse to utter a single word of conversation until I was well away from the sanctuary. Perhaps I’d go to get a cheap breakfast with my friends after the 7 o’clock mass. I’d go home and perhaps do a little cleaning. Perhaps Rachmoninov’s 3rd Piano Concerto would be playing in the background. I’d sing along, even if I was reading a book. I think in my old age I would have recourse to books that are even older than I am.

I would die without much to do. My kids wouldn’t dare sell my books. They would understand that books are a representation of a person. Knowing what books are on a person’s bookshelf tells you more than talking with them for an hour. They are the physical representations of that man’s understanding. My books would be full of years of scribbles, underlines and discourses. The handwriting would be slightly different at various points, as I came back to the great classics at least every decade. I would direct my house to be given to my grandchild who was engaged at age 22. My corpse would rot just as effectively in this day and age as it will in 70 years when I might actually die, but I have to think that as time presses on the rot which eats away at the soul will only grow.