Alexandersmap

    Tag: Worthen House

    • To Live a Life That’s Full

      “It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.” ― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

      And now the end is here
      And so I face that final curtain
      My friend I’ll make it clear
      I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain
      I’ve lived a life that’s full
      I traveled each and every highway
      And more, much more
      I did it, I did it my way
      — Frank Sinatra, My Way

      At a holiday party not very far from Times Square, New York, a few of us found ourselves in conversation with a large man with a large ego. He was rattling off his successes in life, his conquests in love, his options for the future. He would be the one singing My Way and believing it all applied to him. And maybe it does.

      I happen to love Sinatra’s song, My Way. We used to put it on the juke box at the Worthen in Lowell, Massachusetts late in the night (back when they had a juke box) and serenade each other in youthful optimism. We believed we were already living life our way and were poised to launch ourselves into life to do big My Way things. Life teaches you compromise and concession and sometimes knocks you down a peg or two. When things inevitably go awry, does this mean we aren’t living a full life?

      To live a life that’s full means to steer purposefully towards the dreams that stir our soul while adjusting our course and the set of our sails as life reminds us that we don’t live in a controlled environment. Highs and lows and the occasional nasty storm are going to have their way with us, stall our progress, pull us well off course now and then, and generally take that My Way bravado and throw it out the window. But still we may persist.

      The question to ask ourselves every day on our journey to live a life that’s full is, full of what? To be meaningful, our lives must be filled with purpose and progression, contribution and growth. We grow into a full life, not by traveling a straight line from here to there, but by navigating the hazards of living. Sometimes we choose wisely, and sometimes we find ourselves on the rocks. It is nothing to die, but surely it’s frightful not to live. The only viable choice is to patch ourselves up as best we can and keep going.

      But going where? That which seemed so very important in one stage of life seems less so later. Conversely, things we once never considered seem more important now. Life is change and adaptation. If status and a list of conquests are especially important to one person, for another it might be achieving mastery of playing an instrument or in writing. It may simply mean being there for others from now until the end.

      Sometimes, we have some say in the matter. Mostly, our lives are ours alone to live, yet we aren’t living solely for ourselves. Nobody said it would be easy, friend. But with reflection and purpose we might just find we live our days well enough that we can say with relative confidence and more than a little irony that we did indeed, despite it all, do it our way. That shouldn’t be frightening but, just maybe, a little thrilling.

    • The Old Worthen

      The oldest bar in Lowell, Massachusetts is today called The Worthen House.  Back when I was in college it was called The Old Worthen, and that’s still how I like to remember it.  If you walk into the place today you’ll find tables and a long bar that runs front to back.  The bar is essentially the same, but the tables were an addition after a fire gutted the old place.

      They say that Edgar Allen Poe frequented the place and wrote at least some of The Raven here.  More recently, Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg drank at the Old Worthen.  That’s all fine and good, and as a history buff I appreciate those who came before me, but for me the Worthen was our college bar.  I spent my formative drinking years at The Old Worthen, and those memories are locked in my brain more than any class I took in college.

      Taking nothing away from the current place, back in the mid-1980’s The Old Worthen was a bit of a dump.  Wooden booths were jammed with hearty drinkers.  If you asked the bartender they’d give you a knife to carve your name into the walls.  We put away plenty of pitchers of cheap beer back in our day.

      The Old Worthen had a juke box.  For the life of me I can’t remember how many songs that juke box had, but there were five that always seemed to be playing.  My Way by Frank Sinatra, Mercedes Benz by Janis Joplin, Crazy by Patsy Cline, Tainted Love by Soft Cell and the hairspray rock anthem for somebody, Here I Go Again by Whitesnake.  That’s an eclectic mix of songs if I ever saw one.   The songs that were playing were usually determined by which table had the most quarters.  When we ran out of quarters somebody would jump in with hairspray rock.

      They say there’s a ghost on the second floor of the place.  I never saw a ghost in all the time I spent in that building, but then I never did get up to the second floor.  I like to dance with ghosts, as I’ve written about before.  But for me that doesn’t mean some spirit moving the plates around, it’s looking up at the leather belt driven ceiling fans and knowing I was looking at exactly the same thing that Jack and Allan were looking at 30 years before me.  A part of me lives on in the Worthen, as it does for thousands of others who walked through that front door.

      I’ve been back to the Worthen a couple of times over the years since college, but my time there is done.  The Worthen House belongs to the next generation of drinkers.  And just as the experience I had in the 80’s was different from the experience Kerouac had in the 50’s and Poe had in the mid-1840’s when he was living on the second floor, so too the experience is likely different for the generations that have come after me.  But I’m happy that it keeps on going year after year.