I am afflicted with earworms, sometimes more dreadfully than other times. For instance, we watched an ABBA special on public television one night, and “Dancing Queen” banged around in my head for about two weeks. And that’s about the level of sophistication my earworms bring.

Occasionally, one just pops up to bite me. Like the morning I woke up to “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore," as if I need reminding. It’s a great Ellington tune, but it’s not something you want to think about while you’re struggling to get out of bed.

I usually maintain a level of peaceful  co-existence with my earworms. They come, and they go; they don’t make a lot of difference except for some minor irritation. But occasionally, one pops up and launches me into something akin to a philosophical rant.

That happened to me this morning. It was there when I woke up. The first thing that struggled up into my consciousness was "When I Grow Too Old To Dream."

In case your musical memory doesn’t go back that far, I’ll give you a bit of the backstory: it was written in 1934 by Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II for a film entitled “The  Night is Young.” I’m guessing that the song is remembered by a lot more people than the film is. One small oddity about the song is that the second verse is exactly the same as the first. It’s as if Oscar had gotten to the end of the first verse and decided he had run out of words.

However, what launched my philosophical rant this morning was the question it prompted: do we ever get too old to dream? And if we do, is that one more important thing we’ve given up.

Admittedly I’ve quit dreaming about some things. Once upon a time, I had a fleeting dream about moving to Montreal, at least for a little while. It’s a beautiful city with good food and a wonderful vibe. I knew I’d never do it, but I could dream about it. I don’t anymore. I think I may be too old to learn to say “kidney stones” in Quebecois.

And there have been other dreams I’ve abandoned, some because the older I got, the less attractive they got. Others because—and this is the part I hate—I wonder if I have enough time left to complete something if I started it. The more I thought about it, the sillier that seemed.

It’s possible that at an advanced age you won’t get to finish everything you’ve started, but that’s true at every age. I can’t imagine that John Keats counted on the fact that he would die at 25. However, in the four years he published poetry, he made a name for himself that’s lasted 200 years.

At the other end of the spectrum is Peter Drucker, who lived to be 95 and for almost all of those years wrote, taught, and consulted. If he’d decided when he was 75 or even 85 that it was time to pack it in, we would have missed much of the wisdom he left us.

It is truly written that all of us will—at some point—become late. It is equally true, however, that, except for some people in special circumstances, we don’t know our late date. So it seems to me that instead of seeing some sort of cut-off date for dreaming, we should just keep on trying. I don’t think we’re condemned to a vehicle with no windshield and only a rearview mirror. We can take a cue from Mr. Longfellow and the last verse of his Psalm of Life:

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate; 

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait. 

 Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be up and doing. And trying to get rid of this annoying earworm.