Yes. I’ve now been writing this blog longer than I held any of my jobs as a lawyer, except the AIG gig, which appropriately nearly killed me with the “widow maker”. This one hasn’t.
The godfather of this blog is Michael Barnes, a semi-retired lawyer in Oakland. He is a high school friend of Nancy’s. He and I began emailing frequently, and Michael wrote, “You’re so funny you should write a blog.” Nancy and I made a list of the five funniest people we knew, and Michael was in there. I still think he made his suggestion unironically. Ironically this blog has become less funny over time, somehow. I blame Trump.
So here we are five years later, and Michael is such a gentleman that he hasn’t expressed any regrets. I don’t either; I love this writing. Nothing is at stake. I don’t have to mail it off to editors or agents, and I don’t really even have to worry if anyone likes it. But I enjoy the writing. It demands the kind of effort that in my late age I’m able to give, and it provides opportunities for problem-solving that are satisfying. I get to practice, at a very low level, a craft that I love.
Also, it has allowed me to explore my life, the early years and these later ones, and learn about it. I’m sorry that I’m not as funny as I used to be (or as Mr. Barnes thought I was), but I’m dealing with health issues and some personal stuff. I complain too much, I know.
At one point, my treasured cousin, Kathy Retan, now a freelance editor in Brookline, MA, said that the blog was an excellent first draft of a book—first draft? I wearily wondered, but she has a Ph.D. in English and is used to diligent work.
She recommended a fellow named Ethan Gilsdorf, affiliated with a consortium of writers in the Boston area called Grubstreet.org. He was fabulous. At one point I told him that it was obvious that he was thinking a lot harder about my book than I was.
Alas, he also raised enough questions that I realized that to turn the blog into a book would be to force too many connections that didn’t exist, so I abandoned the effort. Thank you, Ethan, for saving me a lot of worthless work. Anyone considering writing a work of nonfiction couldn’t do better than hiring Ethan to look it over.
I’m also indebted to a writer for Defector.com, which bills itself with deadly accuracy as “the last good website”. I wrote David Roth, one of my favorite writers there, and asked him if he’d stroll by my blog. He did, and I’m going to quote his praise in full as that’s how much it meant to me:
I feel like it's pretty much doing what blogs are meant to do, which is functioning as a place to do and publish some work that is personal and cared-for and yours. It reminds me of the internet I came up reading, which was full of this kind of distinctive and non-commercial writing; maybe, as the social media platforms that replaced all that get worse and worse, people will remember how good this kind of thing can be.
Thank you, David. It’s great to have the praise of a real pro.
So next: A mishmash of some thoughts that come to mind:
Nancy and I having separated in the most amicable way possible, I live in a condo in a complex mainly of old people, who love to work out in their gardens. With my replaced joints, arthritis-ridden wrists and fingers, I do not. One neighbor, John, likes to go out back behind my back window and work there and yell at Jeri, a neighbor across the garden. John has a very resonant and loud voice.
One day, he ventured up to within six feet of where I was sitting in my condo, and yelled at the guy he was with about some plants. I’d been listening to him for about six weeks, and I had had it. I yelled at him that this was my living room, and I couldn’t concentrate for his yelling, and could he keep it down. He said something like “Oh boo hoo, George,” and something worse, and he and the other guy stalked off.
We had some conversations. I told him that I resented people walking up to within mere inches of my chair and having a conversation. He said that he was an “owner”, that is, an owner of one of the condos, and that was his right. I maintained that, nevertheless, I was tired of hearing him.
Soon, he came to the door, and we worked it out. He promised to ask if it was a good time for him to be working out there. I said that was great. He doesn’t bother with that formality anymore, and I don’t care. I don’t remember the occasion, but at some point I hugged him. The poor bastard is 83 and has long covid. My interactions with him have been a highlight of the last five years. He’s from New Jersey and not afflicted with the “Seattle Freeze.”
Next: I have rejoiced in watching Kate grow up. I told Nancy that I could die happy knowing that I had participated in some small way in the creation and development of a truly superior human being. She has all of Nancy’s good traits; brains, emotional intelligence, kindness, and empathy. All she got from me was a sly, dry sense of humor, a sense of outrage, and a right arm that the gods themselves reached down and made a thunderbolt.
Her sense of irony about other people comes from both of us. We have hilarious conversations the contents of which I hope never become public. I’m so proud of her, and she’s such good company, that I am quite often in tears when she leaves us to go out with friends.
One gripe: why has the world become so incompetent? Sometime recently we reached the breaking point with Wells Fargo—I don’t even remember what it was—and moved our money to a small county establishment, Kitsap Bank. They know us already, having hosted Kate’s account, our neighborhood well account, and Kate’s softball team’s short-lived account. They’ve cheerfully put up with a lot without our making them any money.
Upon leaving Wells Fargo, I forgot that our home and auto insurance would make automatic withdrawals, which they did after we removed all of the money. I received an email saying that we owed a $35 fee for being overdrawn, but I could avoid the fee by paying off the insurance withdrawals. I rushed in and did so. The teller assured me that I could close the account the next day.
No. The next morning, I had another notice of an overdrawn account. I seethed for a while, then called a woman to fix it. She rushed so quickly through her intro that I said, “Whoa, whoa, slow down, I can’t follow you.”
She repeated her intro: slowly, three words at a time, with a pause between words.
I said, “OK, you can drop the attitude.” One thing about getting to 70, I’ve learned, is that you don’t have to put up with fuck all. After that, the transaction went smoothly, the fee forgiven, the account closed.
What gets me is the incompetence in the notice. Didn’t anyone notice the possibly contradictory nature of the notice? That we were both overdrawn yet had a grace period? How hard would it be to have someone insert a line of code asking if the customer had recently zero’ed out the account? I received two notices, after all. I’ve worked in a highly-regulated industry, and notices don’t go out like that without a lawyer looking at them.
America is just stupid, and Wells Fargo is a metaphor for it.
Nancy was curious last night and asked Alexa what the adult literacy rate was for Americans. It’s 86%. Then she asked about Cuba, where she and Kate are visiting next week. It’s 99%. How can that be? We can only hope that when the 14% get to the ballot box, they’ll think that “B-i-d-e-n” spells “Trump.” Because that’s who’s voting for him.
Moving on: I’m really alone now. My brother had a stroke two years ago from which he is still recovering and from which he may never fully recover. My sister has devolved into hopeless dementia. Our parents are gone, of course. All I have left are my treasured cousins, daughters of my Uncle Walt, as the head of juvenile books at Random House, the only person of note in our family. They’re family, and they fulfill me in ways that other people simply can’t.
But here at the end I’ve re-connected with my high school friends, as I’ve mentioned. They are all so smart and funny and kind. It’s a new community for me, and, a committed introvert, it’s crucial for my mental health to have them. The other path leads to drink, paranoia, muttering furiously to oneself, and madness.
Five years into writing about myself, I am still discovering my world. But what remains most true is that I love baseball—I was never more my self than standing on the pitcher’s mound with a baseball in my hand.
And writing this blog, lying in my bed at night, thinking, writing in my head, typing, typing, words on my comforter, words that I won’t remember in the morning but may reconstitute in perhaps better formulations later in the day.
To conclude: Kate fulfilling me. Typing on my comforter. Evolution with neighbor John. Twin declines of my sister/brother. The kindness and professionalism of Gilsdorf and Roth and Michael Barnes; Wells Fargo trying to ding us: signs of the times, good and bad. And I haven’t even delved into the possible death of the republic. I’m trying not to think too hard about things like that that I can’t do anything about. Otherwise these last years would be really painful, and I’d like to go out rather more happily than I’ve lived.
My high school friends, my cousins, my wife and daughter will make that true.
Thank you so much for reading.
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