My younger cousins are visiting me from Tennessee, experiencing a Bahamian summer yet again. Listening to their conversations, watching them play, and mixing up dirt and water in gallon bottles, has truly shown me that age ain’t nuttin’ but a number. I’m 20 years older than them and when we laugh together about picking the peas out of their peas n grits, I feel like a young kid again. Ronnie Butler said it best: “We’re just as old as we feel.” We may move a little slower, but everything we do is truly twice as sweet. All of the pleasantries that we enjoyed as kids like Capri Suns and Chubby has been traded in for our Tito’s n’ Crans and Coconut Rum and milk. You never know when it’s your last time climbing a tree outside, picking mangos under the hot Bahamian sun. If I knew when my last moment of carefree childhood adventure was going to be, I would have savored the moment a little more.
But in this song, Ronnie shows us that just because we aren’t kids anymore, it doesn’t mean that we still can’t have fun. Just like wine, life gets better with time. I even find myself telling my cousins, “25 isn’t old, you’ll get it when you’re older”. We need to live our lives with the attitude that Count Bernadino talks about in the second verse of the song: Live life, stay strong and live happily. There’s no use in living a life simply waiting to grow old. Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Even though we change every day, no matter how the days come and go, it’s about how we feel in the daily motions. Just like Ronnie says: ” So what if ine got no teeth?” The things that we loved as children have turned into new things that we love as adults. As a Gen Z writer, I often see that our generation is so afraid of life’s timeline, the predetermined milestones we’re supposed to reach on a schedule, a burden placed on no generation more heavily than ours. We grew up with countdowns. Thirty under Thirty. Married by this age, doctorate by the next. The social media race has begun, and God help you if you need a second to tie your shoes. But Ronnie and Count Bernadino were telling us about life long before most of us were born, and based on the lyrics of their song, they weren’t anxious about a timeline. They were simply concerned about enjoying it. My cousins will go back to Tennessee soon, and I’ll go back to being twenty years older than them, in theory. But for right now, when we pick our mangos together, we’re the same age, somewhere between a Capri Sun and a Coconut Rum, somewhere between childhood and the rest of our lives.
If you live your life, your hot Bahamian summer like a young, strapping … year old, who’s to say that you aren’t?
Ronnie said it best: “We’re just as old as we feel”.
