Staying Gold

In these times...

Photo by Erica Merritt

I have always been intense. At times a little too serious for some. As a kid, I found a home in books. I loved playing with other kids, but if the choice was between being outside with friends or holed up in the corner of my room with my latest imaginary adventure at my fingertips, I often chose the latter.

When I was around twelve, I fell in love with the Greasers from S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. I inhaled that book. Even before seeing them come to life on screen, I loved them all. You might wonder what a Black girl growing up in a predominantly Black suburb of Ohio had in common with a group of white boys from Tulsa, Oklahoma, living on the edge of poverty. Well, everything and nothing. I tend to identify with the underdog or outsider. We were different in a lot of the ways that matter to this world, and the same in many ways that truly matter most.

I was especially drawn to Ponyboy Curtis. He was sensitive, thoughtful and observant. He loved the things I loved: movies, sunsets, sunrises, poetry, daydreaming. His friendships meant everything to him. He also felt misunderstood by his older brother, Darry, who stepped into a father role after their parents were killed in a car accident. My parents were both very much alive, but when I hit adolescence, something shifted between my dad and me. The closeness we shared when I was younger started to fade. In retrospect, I think he struggled to connect with the young woman I was becoming. We were both mourning the transition in different ways, and during that time we often missed the mark with each other.

There’s a famous line from the story: “Stay gold.” It comes from Robert Frost’s poem Nothing Gold Can Stay. Johnny Cade whispers it to Ponyboy with his dying breath, urging him to hold onto his sense of wonder, to stay soft, to stay open, and to hold onto his goodness, no matter how hard the world became.

Photo by Erica Merritt

I hadn’t thought about those words in years. That is until I saw The Outsiders on Broadway a few weeks ago. (Did you know S.E. Hinton started writing The Outsiders when she was just fifteen and published it at eighteen? I love that.)

Watching the story unfold again as an adult lands differently. When Johnny tells Ponyboy to “stay gold,” he’s just heard that the Greasers have beaten the Socs, short for socialites, their longtime rivals. But lying there, burned with his back broken, he can see how meaningless their fight really is. I am sure that things that once mattered a great deal to you can fall away when faced with death. Their world of rumbles (street fights) and invisible neighborhood boundary lines doesn’t feel so far from our current polarization.

Ever since I saw the play, I’ve been asking myself what it means to stay gold in these times to hold onto wonder when so much feels bleak, to stay human when cruelty is being normalized, to be fully alive and even joyful as it feels like democracy is collapsing around us.

For me, part of staying gold is choosing to see others, truly see them, in their full humanity. It’s the same recognition Ponyboy reaches for in his friendship with Cherry Valance, the Soc girl who defies the divide between their worlds. Who should we be reaching for now? I’m not talking about extending ourselves toward those who harm or dehumanize us. Staying gold doesn’t mean abandoning ourselves. It means keeping our hearts open enough to recognize shared humanity where connection is still possible and being wise enough to know when it isn’t.

Staying gold is about remembering what is tender, sweet, beautiful and alive in us, and protecting it fiercely. It’s about refusing to let bitterness harden us into something unrecognizable. I refuse to become the mirror image of that which I wish to resist.

Photo by Erica Merritt

Like Cherry, I’ve been accused more than once of being defiant. I think staying gold in these times requires a certain kind of defiance. It means tuning out the messaging that tells us there is little good left in the world. It also requires fierce devotion to holding on to the parts of us that still believe in the beauty of the world and in each other. Simple and easy are not the same, these are simple concepts that can be hard to practice consistently. I’ll be here doing my best to stay gold, succeeding and then failing and then succeeding again. There’s a line in Frost’s poem that reads, “Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold.” Every day the sun rises and then sets; in autumn, leaves turn and fall, but spring comes and they start over again. Maybe staying gold always isn’t realistic. We will sometimes fail, but we can always return tomorrow to try again.

Stay Gold, My Friends.