A person should be horrified by young people laughing at euthanasia, but I only thought of Margie and that apartment on Erie Street in Minneapolis and how hard it was to keep focused when the object of your lust was laughing to beat the band. She played guitar and sang the blues and wrote her term paper on Joyce's Ulysses, and her laughter was like an aviary of exotic birds. We were young, we had no money, we possessed the world through sheer enthusiasm.
The world belongs to the young. Old pitchers get shelled one day and the next winter are released. Old writers go fallow and that's when people start giving them awards. Old politicians are locked up in think tanks. Old pop stars play casinos. We're marching toward the cliff, and the middle-aged are pushing us and the young are pressing them. The angel is waiting with a cocktail.
The poets told us to gather rosebuds while we could, that the flower that smiles today tomorrow will be dying, and it turns out that they were right.
