I’ve been having a wonderful year since I turned 83 and decided to lighten up on world affairs and let other people agonize over corruption in high places and the fate of American democracy, which concern me too. But at this age one can only take on so much. Time is running out. Time to leave the problems to the young and energetic and devote myself to writing limericks. Better to do one thing well than wave your hands and yell at a brick wall.
One day an old man in Manhattan
Said at the library he sat in,
“Enough politics,
I’ll write limericks.
So light up your pipe and put that in.”A remarkable metamorphosis:
One door opens, one closes.
What a relief
To give up that grief
And happiness is the prognosis.
I live in New York, which has elected a Muslim socialist mayor and is pretty pleased with itself for finding yet one more way to distinguish itself from Cleveland and Spokane and Des Moines, Iowa. But as I go around Manhattan, I overhear the same pointless conversations, agitated people tossing off third-hand opinions about matters they have no direct knowledge of and are powerless to affect, and I am done with it. I am moving on to a state of gratitude.
My life spans a dramatic era. I spent time on Grandma’s farm, read by a kerosene lamp, ate her bread baked in a woodstove, used an outhouse, rode in a wagon towed by Prince and Ned. But I lived into the era of open-heart surgery so the family heart-valve problem I inherited got fixed by Dr. Orszulak the way you’d mend an old shoe, which has given me a couple bonus decades of life beyond what two uncles and an aunt got. So I do not complain about old age, I’m grateful for all of it, hearing loss, neuropathy, arrhythmia, the whole ball game.
I am grateful for the cellphone, which keeps my family in touch when I’m on the road, and for the laptop computer. I am one of the last living American writers to have pounded out a full-length novel on a manual Underwood, all three drafts, and I am not nostalgic for that, not even slightly.
Turning 83 means I will never bother reading Moby-Dick. I will never have to go camping ever again. No need for long-term planning. No need to find myself. This is it. Work with it. I don’t think about death as much as I did in my twenties when it would’ve been a tragedy; now it’s only an obligation. I negotiate with the Lord and all I ask is that I don’t die stupidly like Tennessee Williams who choked to death on a bottle cap. My hope is to reach 97 as my mother did and to achieve that I’ve cut back on my intake of the flesh of large animals. When younger people ask about my health I say, “Never better.” The ailments of old age are not of interest. We’re all walking into the same swamp. So we joke about it. What prize do they give for aging? Atrophy.
One thing I miss are stories. I remember Mrs. Moehlenbrock’s fourth-grade classroom back in 1952, where we sang about Frankie and Johnny who was doing her wrong so she got a .44 at the pawnshop and shot him and he fell and “there was a southwest wind from the northeast corner of hell.” We loved that story. Now, in these troubled times, children can’t sing murder ballads, only mediocre songs about respecting differences. Frankie was real. And the jury said she was innocent.
My Aunt Ruth was a fine storyteller and when she held forth, we shut up and listened. She told about Grandpa waking up eight kids on a winter night to hike through the woods and see a silver timber wolf howling at the moon. She told about our ancestor Prudence Crandall, who admitted several young women of color to her boarding school in Connecticut in 1833 for which she was ostracized by the town, a premature liberal, and driven into exile in Kansas. It was a fine story with characters and a beginning and end. Now all we have are a lot of windy opinions. And now here I am wasting your time with mine.
Thank you for reading this far.
Bless you, whoever you are,
And may you campaign
For what’s just and sane
And truth be your shining star.But to limericize is my fate
Now that the time’s getting late,
And what could be greater
Than to be in The Spectator
And now I shall go and spectate.
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