This whole thing about writing/imagining-to-write to someone long-gone is a bit unheimlich ... eerie ... uncanny. I've only done this once before. More than a decade after you died, my youngest child was expecting our first grandchild. Little did I know how important she would end up being in M and my lives, though I suspect that M knew all along. Y'know, just for the record, you used to say that among the only decent things I'd ever done was to marry a literate woman and one, I might add, who is far more intuitive than I and connects on a far more profound level with our kids and grandkids -- she would, indeed, never refer to them as spawn and grand-spawn as I have often in these scribbles about aging over the past years.
In any case, this first grandchild was predicted by the Seers of that day ... an ObGyn in Chicago. That prophet never bothered to predict that this youngster would ultimately find the eidetic memory that I had once had but was already beginning to lose. None of this was known and I began writing daily letters -- in my excitement -- to "Cletus the Fetus" .... In time, an entourage joined me in writing to the unborn one about how futures unfold. The three other grandparents ... Aunts ... Uncles. But I digress.
I began these ramblings about Playing in the Last Quarter of Life, I suppose, to deal with what others have said and that I was discovering about later life. It ain't for sissies!
You never particularly liked Erik Erikson ... you thought he had watered down the Words of the Master. Still, I was, before I began these notes, confronted by the conflict of Erikson's last stage of life. You, of course knew (dammit, Harold ... You knew just about everything) about that. Those who could feel pride and joy in their accomplishments would spend that Fourth Quarter reflecting, adding to whatever they'd done in life without undue regret, and sharing gracefully what they've gathered together with those who were to follow them. Those who despaired in this stage of life would hold little or no value in the Wisdom they had accrued, would be unavailable to the next generation, and would get stuck in feelings of bitterness.
Well, Harold, I'm not despairing. I am slowly working on making my previous contributions more accessible to others. Indeed, I've copied the 1998 book on how people may come to a healthy state in which they see others (including the unfolding next-Gens) as complex Subjects with Worlds of their Own ... I've copied it on my web-page for any and all to read and am struggling to make it more user-friendly by making it shorter and clearer. Got some publishers interested ... maybe. And I do try to strengthen those connections with the denizens of the future. Funny, isn't it? The ideas for that book of mine were the ones you thoroughly disapproved of and, yet, in precisely that Eriksonian style of supporting students and kids, you once told me: "publish it and take your comeuppance like a man, Howard."
So ... Yes ... I'm writing to you, to one of my Ghosts and, perhaps -- just, perhaps -- you wouldn't with your anti-religious style approve of that. I won't worry about that -- the dead don't get a vote, as Kohelles, the writer of Ecclesiastes might've said. And even if my fantasies are looking back to you and my other hauntings, my interests do flair out into the future.
Like last night ... pretty late ... M and I watched Judy Holiday in the 1961 screen version of The Bells are Ringing with K, one of our younger grandkids ... the actor ... the comic actress who is so much like the talented Holiday who never lived to see this stage of life. The not quite 11 year old was transfixed ... in love with a 50's (on Broadway) musical ... maybe Deo Volente she'll stop watching Disney.
Just one last thing. Funny, again. Was corresponding with some of those pioneers of the future -- not my students or visitors to my office, per se ... just folk I met along the long winding road (see, below). They seemed to believe that my pleasure at the success I mentioned yesterday (or was it the day before?) about getting some rights for a disrespected group of up-and-comers to which they belonged had something to do with some functional value or right that might accrue to me. I considered it for a moment. Then remembered what someone had inscribed about values and relationship inside the back cover of a moldy copy I have of Chesterton's Autobiography. I send it to you ... with love. Howard
(Insciption)
When Chesterton died in 1936,
I took down from my shelf
his fine book on Charles Dickens and,
as a private memorial Service,
reread the final paragraph. It ran like this:
"We have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant;
and the passage is along a rambling English road,
a twisting road such as Mr. Pickwick travelled.
But this, at least, is part of what he meant;
that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel;
but rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy,
which through God shall endure forever.
The Inn does not point to the Road;
the Road points to the Inn.
And all roads point to that ultimate Inn,
where we shall meet Dickens and all his Characters, and
when we drink, again,
it shall be from the great flagons in the Tavern at the End of the World."
-- from Woolcott in Long, Long Ago
No comments:
Post a Comment