One of the nice things about getting a tad older is that experience is layered…lots of stuff, past and present, going on at the same time.

Like this. Last night, Hilary and I were at the Algonquin here in New York. An astonishing sixteen-year-old girl named Judy Butterfield is singing Judy Garland songs from fifty years ago. Not so many sixteen year old girls singing at the Algonquin…this girl is amazing. Her mother is sitting beside me in the sold-out, darkened supper club. I have known her since she was sixteen and she and my daughter were in school together. And I heard those Judy Garland songs when they came out.

In the darkened room the young woman turns to a favorite, You Made Me Love You. My sister Petie used to sing it all the time. And sometimes, to tease me – we were close all our lives – she’d follow me around the house, as if she were the torch singer and I was her lover. Complicated. “…you got the kinda lovin’ that i’d die for ….”

You get to a certain age and life gets almost symphonic…all those thoughts going at once…all those layers. A complex descant of memory, playing over the reality in the darkened, crowed room. Interesting.