ONE
Fountain of Youth
A lot of people can’t stand touring but to me it’s like breathing.
Bob Dylan
Dylan is very much living up to his words. The 75-year-old singer-songwriter
and Nobel Prize winner was an icon of baby boomer culture in the 1960s
(although he was actually not one himself), and to this day he embodies
the spirit of the generation who will always remain at some level forever
young. Dylan is constantly on the road, not about to retire to his house in
Malibu to stare out into the ocean and remember better days. While the
man’s body has aged, he is doing exactly the same thing as he did while
JFK was president, an amazing achievement by any measure.
While Bob Dylan is no doubt a remarkable specimen (other still active
70-something musicians include Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart, Tina
Turner, Aretha Franklin, Neil Diamond, Paul Simon, and members of the
Rolling Stones), many members of the generation he inspired are display-
ing clear signs of perpetual youth. Although one’s body may not have got
the memo, youth is not something that necessarily goes away at age 20,
30, or any other chronological measure. Rather, youthfulness is an idea
that anyone, regardless of his or her age, can subscribe to as part of an
approach to or philosophy of life. This is especially true for boomers, who
broke away from their parents’ generation by adopting a lifestyle and
political orientation that immediately became associated with youthful
values. Well after the counterculture, many boomers held onto their deter-
mination to remain in some way “forever young,” and to this very day are
