Can't believe I got to see Irma Thomas in person a few years back.

But time is on my mind just now. This is for two reasons:

1) Two old friends died under conditions that felt like almost the polar opposite of what we would have expected when we were all very young together. There was so much promise and so much hopefulness and so much enthusiasm and so much pluck.

But then 50+ years later, aloneness and physical distress and self-despair. Terminal, in fact. Who would have thought? Not I.

So I'm seeing each of these old friends as they were when they were 20, then comparing their circumstances at death decades later. Time was not on their side.

2) One of my heroes, J.B. Priestley (d. 1984), wrote plays about this. Especially his 1937 masterpiece Time and the Conways. He tried to understand the meaning, the constituent elements, and the implications of time, and us. I think he came very close. (Time and the Conways, incidentally, was filmed, and very well, in 1985. You can see it right now on YouTube.)

Oh, and just to show everyone that time really doesn't matter, within eternal perspective that is, I've put at the end of the cast the absolute best cover version ever recorded of Irma Thomas' famous song. You'll see. Or rather, you'll hear. LUV U.