They Call Me Mellow

I bet you thought I forgot a word in the title. If you are a Donovan fan, I know you did. But no, they don’t call me mellow yellow. Just mellow. You hear that word often as people age. Mellow. Even the word itself sounds mellow. Mellow. It’s not all jumpy and jaggedy like the word “excitable”. He was just an excitable boy, said the late great Warren Zevon.

What the heck am I talking about? I am reading a book, “The Water Dancer” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s about a slave in Virginia. Great book, by the way. In it, I saw these lines “I do not claim to have loved Sophia then, though I thought I did. I was young and love to me was a fuse that was lit, not a garden that was grown”. That struck a chord and took me back to my teenage years at Slatington High School.

Love as a teenage boy. A fuse that was lit. The excitement you felt when you saw her in the hall. Holding hands after school. Sitting together at a basketball game. All you could think about was her and how good she looked that day. Then when you got home and talked on the phone with her for hours, about nothing, but the hours flew by. You would write her love notes and fold them in that way we used to fold notes, long before Snapchat. You would look forward to the weekend and hope you got time alone with her at a place you would park to make out. First base. Second base! I’m not going any farther. This is a family blog. Just imagine Meatloaf and his amazing song. Yes, all of us teenage boys were looking for paradise by the dashboard light.

But, alas, those teen years are long gone. I’m single, but no longer an excitable boy. I am not looking for that love that knocks you off your feet. Like Coates said in his book, I’d like to have love grow, like a garden. A companionship, with benefits of course, I’m 68, not dead. A mellow love. Oh okay. I’ll go ahead and say it. They call me mellow yellow, quite rightly. Just waiting for saffron to come along.

Happy New Year everyone!