When I Was Young

Songs and poems from those days tell a story of a different world

Photo by Eliott Reyna on Unsplash

There were a lot of things going on when I was 16–19 years old! I think I have mentioned previously, that I write various things at that time, such as humoristic texts, poems, and songs, and much of it was published, some of the songs performed, either by me or by others.

This article is written because I just fell over a bunch of those old writings, and that made me think a bit. This bunch was about 37 years old.

In those days, I didn’t think too much about writing as anything serious. It just was. Not a career, not a thing to take seriously. “Getting published” wasn’t a goal, not even a dream, like it is for many who write today. I guess that I just looked at life as it unfolded day by day, and took in what it offered, and I wrote because I liked to do it, the same way as today.

There were also problems of various kinds, with economy, girls, study, hangovers, and almost everything else. Then, as now, I was often in a position where I felt that I just needed a bit of room around me, a bit of my own life, such one that I could decide over myself, rather than being pushed around by others. But for a young person, everybody wants to push them around, so there was always that tension between me and the world, where I never felt that I was fully allowed to be me.

I wrote songs and poems about all that, and most of it wasn’t published. It is a bit unclear what may have been read by others, as I have had some strange experiences along the way in life:

Some poems and other writings that I had decided to throw away - and did - started appearing in my mailbox a while after, one after another. Nobody ever told me that they did it, but I had some suspicions. Whatever this was all about, I suppose that they had read these things, even though it is unclear how they found them in the trash.

Years after, I suddenly got a binder with a bunch of additional texts of different kinds - this time from my father, who had found them between some of his old papers and concluded that they had to be mine.

I wonder what else has been spread out in the world and read by people, and what still exists. It is, after all, more than 35 years since it was written.

The world was different then. Not just for me, because I was so young, but for everybody.

I had a computer, a home computer more precisely, which was uncommon then. It was not connected to the Internet, as such a thing didn’t exist yet, and even though I had a printer, it was of such a primitive type that it was unsuitable for most real-world purposes.

So, as a writer, I got myself a typewriter. First a fancy, modern one with a memory and a small display, that allowed me to type a line of text before it was printed on the paper. This way, I could edit the text before it went on paper, and most of what I wrote with that one, therefore, was flawless, more or less.

But it had tiny little ink cartridges that lasted for about 7–8 pages, and they had a price of around 8 dollars each, so it became a very expensive improvement of my life. Also, I couldn’t get used to this strange rhythm of writing one line at a time, then stop and edit, and finally wait for it to print, until I could write the next line.

Luckily, the shop where I’d bought it agreed to take it back when I bought a more traditional electrical typewriter instead.

What I find now, has mostly been written with one of these two machines, and only in rare cases by using the computer.

Some of the songs were love songs, never to be heard or read by the subject of my love. She didn’t know, and circumstances were so that it made no good sense to tell her. But I felt it, and wrote about it.

Now that I think about it, I remember how I also wrote love poems for another guy who couldn’t do it himself but wanted to impress a girl. She was impressed, I think, but she was also a bit puzzled, since that guy wasn’t exactly what you would call a literary type. At some point in time, I managed to tell her that I wrote them, not him, which made her very sad. I still regret that I told it, and in a way, I regret that I wrote them for him. The whole thing had an aura of dishonesty over it. But the poems were good, as I remember it, even though I don’t think I have a copy of them, so I cannot check it out.

People didn’t have computers, I mentioned. Most people didn’t have typewriters either. When they wrote something, it was mostly by hand. As students, we wrote a lot, of course, and it took time for writing a draft, then writing the whole thing again, this time with errors corrected and the nicest possible handwriting style.

I was miserable at that two-step approach. I usually wrote two completely different texts instead: one in the draft, another in the final version. I suppose that is why I later in life, when using a computer became the norm, simply got used to just write what I wanted to say straight out of my mind in one go, like this text. No editing afterward, and no attempt to run through it for editing and improving it, because that just means writing one more story.

Since I was a vegetarian in a place far away from any real city, in the middle of nowhere, it was complicated for me to go shopping for food. They had almost nothing interesting, apart from the sparse selection of vegetables that meat-eaters in the country like to eat. For that reason, cooking became a hobby for me, and I found recipes and prepared them by not only cooking, but also searching all the nearest shops in the towns around where I lived, to actually get some ingredients to cook from.

This cooking hobby led to me having a section in our school magazine for gastronomy. I don’t know what I was thinking, but it was written in a humoristic style, which, I found out, meant that nobody wanted to try cooking any of my recipes, as they simply thought that it was only for fun. They never suspected that the recipes themselves were indeed great, even if wrapped up in humor.

Some of the poetry, actually most of it, was in the other end of the scale. Very serious and deep. Not always depressed, even though it could be, but in poetry I found that I could write in a completely free style about anything that was on my mind, mostly emotional. When looking at the poetry now, I see a young man’s mind, but one that is still part of me. So, I recognize the thoughts and emotions, but I think that even if I could write something similar today, it would more likely be fried on both sides, so to speak, as I now try to expand that immediate emotion that is behind a poem. Not sure that it becomes better from it, though. The young me had some qualities that are now rarely exposed, as life has partly reshaped them, partly covered them with all that garbage we collect through life, of which ambitions, a wish to fit into the society, make a career, etc., creates an almost impenetrable layer of non-value that prevents that young us from being heard.

Maybe someone, some day, will find some of my old me’s thoughts in that garbage, and start feeding them through my mailbox?

Looking back on life doesn’t make me want it to come back. A lot of my life was of a nature that I am happy to have survived, and I don’t think back on it with pleasure.

But bits and pieces were good. Of life, and of me. And that should be welcome back, if it only, this time, can refrain from evolving into something unwanted.

I thought about trying to translate some of the old poems from their original Danish (I wrote some in English as well, but didn’t stumble upon any this time around), but I realized that it was not only difficult, it was impossible, as some of them were very much of a linguistic exercise, using the language into its edges and corners, and there would also be a translation needed of both the writer, the young me from long ago, into a modern person, and the time and its topics and problems, into the modern life.

A lot of the emotions and events of those days would probably be incomprehensible for today’s people. Of course, some people are as old as me and may remember something from back then, but most people are not, or do not remember — or simply didn’t live that life I lived.

So, I’ll let the past be the past, and again, after this little glimpse of nostalgia, turn my eyes and my mind in the other direction, to live now, the next moments, and in the future, with the conditions that exist by then — me being the new me, the world being the new world, and life moving in only one direction.