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“Rat race is a perfect name for it,” she said. “We’re always going and going and going, and never asking where. Did you ever hear of having more than you wanted? So that you couldn’t want anything else and then started looking for something else to want? It seems like we’re always searching for something to satisfy us, and never finding it. Maybe if we could lose our cool we could.”
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“You read a lot, don’t you, Ponyboy?” Cherry asked. I was startled. “Yeah. Why?” She kind of shrugged. “I could just tell. I’ll bet you watch sunsets, too.” She was quiet for a minute after I nodded. “I used to watch them, too, before I got so busy . . .”
It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset.
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But I realized that these three appealed to me because they were like the heroes in the novels I read. Dally was real. I liked my books and clouds and sunsets. Dally was so real he scared me.
“Nothing gold can stay.”
“Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.”
“I’d help you if I could,” I said. I remembered Cherry’s voice: Things are rough all over. I knew then what she meant. He looked at me. “No, you wouldn’t. I’m a Soc. You get a little money and the whole world hates you.” “No,” I said, “you hate the whole world.”
Socs were just guys after all. Things were rough all over, but it was better that way. That way you could tell the other guy was human too.
“Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold . . .”
I’ve been thinking about it, and that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you’re gold when you’re a kid, like green. When you’re a kid everything’s new, dawn. It’s just when you get used to everything that it’s day. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. That’s gold. Keep that way, it’s a good way to be.
