A few fingers on my left hand were resting against my right wrist this morning when I noticed it. I was a reading a story by Garrison Keiller, the words spread across my lap, and I too felt the ancient summer he was describing, when the summer air moved hope and promise across his face as his car hurtled down a more innocent street.

My pulse.

I don’t know the last time I felt my pulse. But there it was, steady and strong, a metronome keeping time to whatever song I was living in this morning. I wondered how many of these beats I had left, how many more times I would see that faint rise and fall under my skin.

There is a finite number, you know. Only so many. The beats measure our time here, like a kick drum throbbing through a Zeppelin song on AM 760 in 1975, before the last cymbal crash washes into the static.

That’s what we all do one day. Wash into the static. But for now, if you’re reading this, you can feel your own rise and fall.

A pulse.

The beat of a kick drum.

To what song?