Monday, October 24, 2011

Well Happy Birthday to George (yesterday, the 23rd)

He'd have turned 100 yesterday, so it's a pretty good bet that even if he hadn't died all those years ago, he'd be dead by now anyway. I'm not sure what that means. Children of parents who died young deal with strange thoughts the rest of their lives, I guess. Like "When my old man was my age he'd been dead for nine years." I turn 65 today. It was not all that long ago that I considered the event very unlikely. Maybe even undesirable. But today I'm delighted, given the alternatives, and I have plans for the next 20 (or ten, or thirty, whatever) years; I need to cram my life's work into them, and I consider that I need to get all of my life's work into them, and that life's work would not have ended at 65 or 66 or whenever I choose to "retire" - which really only means stopping the work I don't care about but do for money, and taking up the work I do care about but was unlikely to have made a living at. What if it turns out that I'm really good at it and could have made a living at it? That has occurred to me more than once, and I've allayed any fear of such by deciding that if I had given it a shot 30-odd years ago, and had succeeded, I'd probably be burned out by now and  - like Bronco Bill in Don McLean's song - have nothing left to say. Vonnegut claimed - at a point before he'd actually stopped writing - that he had said everything he had to say and didn't really have any more books in him. But what else could he have done, I guess? So my philosophy now is from Rabbi Ben Ezra, via Robert Browning: "grow old along with me, the best is yet to be."