TINA TURNER

TINA TURNER

Last night was the fourth and most probably final Tina Turner concert that I have attended/will attend. The promotional booklet announced this as her 50th Anniversary Tour. It was a retrospective of her career - nothing new. I suspect it will be her last. I'd heard the music before, been startled by the pyrotechnics before, and marvelled at her extraordinary skill at dancing in stiletto heals along a narrow hydraulic catwalk with no protective railing as it had an erection above the heads of the audience... all before! She appears so unchanged: powerful voice, killer legs, astonishing energy. Phenomenal for what? seventy? or very close. And yet she sat on chairs with the band for four songs.

It was then that I realized that I was twenty-six when I first saw her in concert with Ike in Oahu in July, 1971 shortly after my graduation from Social Work School and immediately before I began the second third of my life. That was the period when I would become a grown-up and live out the identity that had been struggling to emerge for the first twenty-five years or so.

Earlier in last night's concert when Tina was strutting about the stage and filling this huge stadium with the notes of her raucous voice I had begun to cry.(Something I have virtually never done in these past two years) I was overwhelmed with the loss of my own energy, my own strut, my own voice. Later, while I watched her sitting there singing to the silver-haired audience I was struck with the following observation: "Of course she's sitting down; she's seventy for god's sake!" She's not the same. The audience is not the same. And I'm not the same!

So who am I in this final third of my life? With the deck stacked against me? (Unlike in the past two segments) Who am I to be in this disease-riddled body? Who am I drained of all passion? I don't know this one. Truth is that I don't really care to know him either. What I want is to wake up from what feels like one of those nightmares in which some malevolent force has you cornered and it is impossible to get your body to move either in fight or flight. I want to wake to my former self. My love of fast-paced walking, humor, new projects, endless planning, travel, and, Achilles heel be damned, romance. Is this (God Forbid!) mere self-pity? Or is it the deep sadness that accompanies irrevocable loss? Or is it something else altogether? In this particular nightmare my mind is no more nimble than my paralyzed body. I don't know.

However, there is something that I do know. Actually something that I continue to know, as I know that I have always known it. I know that I am surrounded by the most extraordinary beauty imaginable. I sit here on my terrace looking up every few minutes at the river that flows by in a westerly direction nudged by the incoming tide. The same breeze that gently caresses my skin causes the palm fronds that line the river to shimmer in the afternoon sun and every leaf and flower to sway as if in syncopated dance. The ever changing light is dazzling as it plays across the garden. When I give my full attention to this wealth of beauty that surrounds me I recall with deep appreciation Tina singing from the chair. The music is the same if not the singer.