The Zoey Blog: Stay Gold FINAL - COVER UNIVERSE EXPLORERS ORDER


Sunday, July 10, 2011

Stay Gold

stay gold tattoo ankles

When I was a kid I transitioned from Huck Finn to The Outsiders rather than endure puberty, as most of my peers might have. I slipped almost seamlessly from Tom Sawyer to Ponyboy Curtis without so much as a voice change. It would serve as a major moment in the trajectory of my life. I don't kid myself into thinking that S.E. Hinton's classic novel about adolescence didn't have anything to do with the life and career I've chosen for myself. I associated myself with those kids from wrong side of the tracks very early on, and am proud I did. I never forgot what Ponyboy said when he laid out the entirety of my life's philosophy in one sentence to Cherry Valance, "Don’t forget that some of us watch the sunset too." It was the watershed moment that laid firmly the bricks of my sturdy foundation.

Does it make sense that I might want something from the book and film permanently emblazoned on my body? To some, no, but to others, for certain, and I might. There's something in between the lines of Robert Frost's famous poem, and what is arguably The Outsiders most famous scene, in this most recent experience of watching my life slip painfully from uncertainty into stability. In Nothing Gold Can Stay I have found the not too dramatic Felix Culpa of my own life, and in that moment I have come to see the world a little differently. Good and bad go together, pain and pride, accomplishment and anxiety. Without loss there cannot be redemption, and without The Outsiders and Robert Frost, there isn't the me that types this nonsense.

Stay gold good friends. Stay gold.

1 Comments:

Blogger Beth said...

If you got this tattoo we would have to be best friends for life....just saying. The Outsiders is probably the reason I wanted to be an English teacher.

July 10, 2011 at 11:55 PM  

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