I always expected this time of life
to be different,
but now I don't feel the difference,
except that I can't identify
with the person in mirrors
and storefront windows,
and that I've accustomed myself
to antihypertensive medications
and mild anticoagulants
like acetylsalicylic acid

I think I've always,
contrary to – or as a result of -
my passion for all kinds of music
and sound art,
have enjoyed silence
the way I still do,
and loneliness is always a risk,
isn't it?

And I know I have to watch myself
when I get irritated beyond reason
over small things

“You can hurt someone and not even know it”,
as Bob Dylan has it in Times Have Changed

Yes, it may all really end with a whimper,
T. S. Eliot's way,
the way my dad passed at 87 in June 1992,
going to the hospital with a bad arm,
falling asleep
and never waking,
with not as much as a sign or trace
of fight or anxiety,
suddenly a thing instead of a man,
his jaw tied up,
one single hospital courtesy flower
in a vase
and a candle lit
on the bedside table,
my 7-year-old son waiting in the car
down in the hospital parking lot,
shying away from seeing his dead grandpa

And my mom passed almost imperceptibly too,
at the old age home at 95, in April 2007

I visited her a couple of days earlier,
when she was drifting in and out
of sleep,
completely aware and sharp-minded
in her wake states,
but as I left I heard her beg for some rest,
although she was indeed resting;
in fact feeling an urge for the bigger rest,
her wish soon to be granted

Now, much later,
as I approach a relentless age myself,
I sometimes listen to Mom and Dad
on five CDRs of interviews
that I conducted with them, individually,
in 1989 and -90,
starting with Dad in May 1989;
then an 84-year-old storyteller,
bailing out large portions
of detailed accounts of his long life,
digging into his faultless memory

Mom granted me as detailed and exact accounts
on Christmas 1989 and Easter 1990,
at age 78

These five CDRs, meticulously secured
on various media and in the Cloud,
were originally recorded on a cassette deck,
at a time when the earliest CD-burners started
showing up on radio stations
and in professional studios

Recordable compact discs had not as yet exploded
on the market,
and were such a novelty,
if they could at all be purchased,
that a single CDR costed several thousand Swedish crowns,
not to mention the price of CD-burners,
which also were so sensitive
that a door being closed
or someone walking across the floor,
would instantly destroy the burn
- but the money I paid was well worth
making records of my parents;
1904 – 1992 (Dad)
1911 – 2007 (Mom)

Through luck, will and curiosity,
and an extended research,
I was referred to a studio technician
at The Swedish Broadcasting Corporation
in Gothenburg,
where one of the first CD-burners in Sweden
had appeared

He volunteered to do the transfer
from compact cassettes to CDRs,
and in addition he cleaned up the sound,
through the Broadcasting Corporation's
state of the art means,
liberating it of tape hiss and extraneous disturbances,
returning crystal clear CDRs

I realize I'm approaching that stage in life myself,
when I could be the one with a microphone in my face,
put there by young curious relatives,
as I ponder the fact that I haven't worked since 2016,
and that I, already then, had stayed on two extra years
as a civilian crime investigator with the Police

But no matter,
it doesn't feel like I thought it would;
Dylan at 81, still at it,
and yesterday my road bike exercise
amounted to 100 kilometers (60 miles)
of rain and shine over the long, winding,
empty roads
of Northern Sweden's coniferous endlessness