One Day Older

"One Day Older" began with a Facebook post from Beverly, someone I knew from the West End Park neighborhood of Cohoes, New York, and a good friend of my triplet sisters Debbie and Doreen. Beverly is one day older than me. We had not seen one another since at least 1983, but something in her words landed with the strange familiarity of an old street you have not walked in decades. We came out of the same mill-town world while Cohoes was winding down from its long linen-mill history. We were kids around alcohol, woods parties, smoke, noise, and the ordinary confusion of trying to grow older before we understood what growing older meant. The song does not glorify any of that. It looks back without pretending the past was cleaner than it was. Decades later, Beverly is in Phoenix and I am farther south in Sierra Vista. The distance is real, but so is the recognition. This became a song about how place follows us, how old neighborhoods keep weather inside us, and how two lives can rhyme again after forty-plus years. The finished reference runs almost exactly six minutes. We are both 60. I decided the song had signed its own ending.