Greetings to whomever might be tuning in~
First off, I have never thought of myself as any sort of memoirist. The current popularity of memoir writing, in fact, strikes me… or has struck me… as both surprising and beside the point. “Why tell that kind of truth when you can make stuff up?” I often asked myself.
It also seems, I must admit, more than a little bit terrifying. Who wants to tell the inside workings of their life? Not me! As a matter of fact, most everything I have written, every story I told over the course of eight published novels and one collection of stories, has been decidedly not autobiographical. I have set my stories in distant lands - Japan, Korea, Nigeria, Kenya - invented characters vastly different from myself, and then tried to make those characters interesting or funny on their own.… “Go out there and win yourself an audience!” I felt that I was telling them. To me that - plus, of course, an abiding dedication to honing and honoring the English language - was writing. Who cared what the puppeteer thought when the puppets were engaging and the story well-told?
Now, though, at what the generation before mine often called “the ripe old age” of something or other - in my case it is seventy-seven - and with my tenth work of fiction (The Grievers’ Group) about to come out, I thought that maybe I, also, should come out (not in the usual sense, but from behind the curtain), to talk about the three subjects at the top of this page without the artifice of character or of made-up worlds created for those characters to play around in. In other words, I thought I might simply chat a bit as me, Richard, with people who might care to chat along.
Once a couple of years ago, someone asked me, “How does it feel to be turning seventy-five” - (that’s how I know it was a couple of years ago) - and my answer was that it felt like I was sitting in a rickety old car, idling at the edge of an immense forest called “Old Age,” and just about to put that car in gear and drive on in.
Well, two years have passed and I still feel that way, though the ‘immense forest’ has gotten closer without me putting the car in gear. So I guess I better speak before I dawdle in among all those ancient trees. I don’t know what the specific subjects will be each week, but I’ll do my best to do speak as myself, and not, as has been my lifelong habit, as someone else.
As I read over what I’ve written, the words “seventy-seven” still jump out at me.
“Double hockey sticks” was what we said when talking about “hell” when I was a kid… We would spell it out, saying something like, “You are going to ‘h’…’e’… ‘double hockey sticks.’”
I see now that “seventy-seven” is double hockey sticks, too, only upside down, and that the look of it not only jumps out, but strikes fear into my heart. Hell (heh), when my grandparents were seventy-seven, they had tobacco stained fingers, wheelchairs and walkers, heart attacks and strokes and dentures and forgetfulness…
And here I am still comparatively fit.
So the lesson is, if there is a lesson… I better be me in the time I have left.
Unless, of course, I’m writing fiction.
I hope you’ll tune in and I hope it will be interesting.
Next time something about that boat ramp.
Has 77 become the new 65 (which is just a night's sleep away for me)? Why do we tend to hang on to these numbers as if they represented something important about who we are? Sure, your friends and family need to know how many candles to put on the cake, and, at 77, insurance companies will run when you apply for long-term care insurance. It's what's within those 77--or for me 65--years that matters. So I'll let you be a couple of hockey sticks. Those hockey sticks have won championship tournaments, been lovingly cared for, polished, refinished, buffed. They've practiced, practiced, practiced! Their woodgrain has mellowed and grown smooth, gentler, but hold their necessary strength. The Ol' 77s have been taped and waxed repeatedly to reduce friction between the ice and the blade. They are sleek; they're passed with honor to the next generation who receives them with gratitude. They are more than hockey sticks. They are (I'm going to let others fill in the blank here) _________________.
Old people aren't as old as they used to be.