Sharon Kincaid

Grow old along with me

Leonardo Di Caprio in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood

Dear Bolu,

One lonesome night—I cannot tell you which as they all have the same trappings—I had the pleasure of a walk with an author long-lived and long-dead. He held my hand as we sauntered through the clippings of a world he created decades ago using ink and the blessed gift of intellect. I don’t think myself imaginative in the slightest, but his penmanship was laced with such virtue as to endow me with the imaginativeness of a visionary. I could feel the sand in between my wiggling toes on the beaches he made us travel, and the smell of his summer was a smell and not the idle description of a season. When he spoke of tobacco and women and Fords and carnivals and cantaloupes, I could perceive them as if they shared the same plane of reality with me. It was some walk. Each path, though beaten by the millions of readers that had been there before me, seemed tailor-made for my wandering eyes and feet. He posed questions, and although most went unanswered, it was enough to see them. They were questions I’d always wondered about, and they reminded me of the rather singular nature of all of man’s problems.

As we walked, I came upon the words of one Sharon Kincaid. She’s as lovely as her name, and frankly, I don’t think anyone so named could be anything but lovely. She’d quoted a poet (this I knew only because of the author’s embroidered pen), saying;

Grow old along with me,

The best is yet to be.

The words read familiar. They were dressed a little differently than I remembered, perhaps, but I was convinced of their familiarity. Similar to the junction leading to your old high school, now adorned with billboards and traffic lights, yet still inherently familiar, I knew those words and where they would take me. Within seconds, I  remembered where I'd first heard them. I haven't lived too much, you see. As such, I have the pleasure of a handful of past lives and I only had to pull on a memory thread from one of them. It was a song with the lines,

Grow old with me

Let us share what we see

And oh the best it could be

Just you and I

It was Tom Odell’s Grow Old With Me. It's still every bit as beautiful as it was on first hearing, and is bettered in loveliness only by one Sharon Kincaid. Surely it wasn't coincidental that Sharon and Tom's words were essentially the same, and a quick web search confirmed my suspicion.  In fact, there have been a bunch of songs so named, all presumably taking inspiration from a poem by Robert Browning. And to have connected the dots between a song, a book, and a poem across three different centuries was pleasantly satisfying.

I quite like homages. The only things I enjoy better than being told of a homage are peanuts and recognizing a homage by myself. Homages are tributary, celebratory, and educational, and contribute to the continuity of an artistic tradition and style. However, it is not for these reasons they most delight me. Homages validate the existence of art. When you consume an artwork, there is a connection, an intimate dialogue between the creator and you, the audience. But it is when you stumble upon that familiar stroke of a pen or brush, that reenactment of an eternally long tracking shot, that echoed motif in the bridge of a rap record, or that subtle dialogical nod to another artwork within a piece, it is then that your encounter with the original work feels validated. That is when you realize that art isn’t isolated; it’s an intricate web of influences, inspirations, and interconnected narratives. Homages say, for a fact, that a piece of art previously seen was truly seen. They affirm that every stroke, every concept, every idea, and every conjuring from the realm of inspirations, is not only real but also part of a larger artistic universe, enriching and validating your experience.

So when an episode of Spy X Family features the Rocky Balboa training montage, I am elated and overcome with rhapsodies of joy. Similarly, when I stumble upon a short story by Maria Edgeworth published in 1801 which, with modest certainty, I can attribute some inspiration of Brymo’s Purple Jar to, I feel a surge of exuberance that compels me to want to scream. I know this. I see this! I’ve seen this. And it is brilliant. That lonesome night, one Sharon Kincaid made me feel the same with her quote. Tears of profound happiness ran down my face, but I did not cry. And it is to her and her brilliant author that I make this here homage: “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, dear friend”.

Fin.

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Write you soon, merci!

- Wolemercy