Last night, Cathy and I braved the cold and snow and ice to hear the music of Phil Dirt and the Dozers, a band who plays, as one member says, “songs from the nineteen-hundreds.” In other words, an oldies band that first formed in 1981and has kept going ever since. One member is approaching eighty; another is nearly seventy. You get the idea—a group of professional musicians who love what they do and who intend to do it as long as they can.

The evening was, in a word, sublime. From the first falsetto notes of a Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons medley to the high-octane encore rendition of Mitch Ryder’s covers of Shorty Long’s “Devil with the Blue Dress On” and Little Richard’s “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” the joint, as they say, was jumpin’. Audience members danced the twist between their tables and tossed their hands in the air, as instructed, to the chorus of the Beach Boys standard, “Help Me Rhonda.” This was far from a night of nostalgia, though there was plenty of that. It was above all a celebration of the creative spirit, the force that’s sustained many of us for years. We choose to create something, whether it be music, art, pastries, or poetry or prose. We engage with the world by making things be they furniture pieces, houses, sculptures, inventions, plays, or whatever our talents produce. We sustain ourselves, and we try to sustain the world by what we give those around us. A full, vibrant life demands creation rather than destruction.

I write this on the birthday of Martin Luther King, a man who gave all he had to creating equality and peace. Even though an assassin’s bullet took his life, King’s influence lives on. When it comes to civil rights, there’s so much more work to be done, but what he created carries forth to this day. In his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King says, “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.” The creative spirit, as five men of well-seasoned years proved last night, persists. To make something is to love something, maybe even the world, imperfect as it is. To make something is to insist on the power of creation to take us to a more human place, a place of joy, perhaps, or nostalgia, or understanding, or celebration.

Time runs short the older we get, but last night Cathy and I celebrated the nearly two hours of continuous music Phil Dirt and the Dozers provided. The final song before the encore was Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.” This song of thanksgiving, faith, hope, and love was a stirring reminder to keep creating, and as these five men, glorious in all they’d given, soaked up their well-earned applause, I believed, and even today when that other event is taking place in Washington D. C., I still believe.