Everyone is always proclaiming how short life is. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld noted that but said something to the effect of, No, life is very long.
Mr. Seinfeld and I are nearly the same age, and I heartily agree with him. Some recent events have confirmed what I, going out in a pleasant haze of whiskey, pot, and oxycodone, have intuited. This is a fucking long ride.
Yesterday, when I was watching some lame football game, a gladiator named “Ed Oliver” was announced. It almost dizzied me. Ed Oliver was a graduate student in the English department when I was an instructor, in the late 70’s. I’m pretty sure he was ex-military, and once he intoned, “Only in America can someone like John Carlos [one of the Mexico City Olympians who raised their black-gloved hands on the medals stand] find gainful employment.”
It's now more likely than not that I run into a face, a name, something that reminds me of someone in my past. Was he in high school? College—probably not, I don’t remember much of anyone from there. The MFA program at UNC-Greensboro, teaching at Auburn, or law school at Chapel Hill, or practice in Greensboro, Research Triangle Park, Delaware, or Seattle? I’ve moved so much that my memory is a shattered kaleidoscope.
My Jarecki cousins have lived their entire lives in the coal country town of eastern Pennsylvania, Glen Lyon, to which our common grandfather immigrated from Poland in the early 20th century (or maybe late 19th), so they have an easier time remembering people. By the way, that grandfather died of the Spanish flu in 1918. My family can stretch the hell out of a generation.
As I’ve chronicled before, another kaleidoscope is the faces and names of surgeons, doctors, and nurses. My record of surgeries at Virginia Mason is so replete that once I spied an errant rotator cuff surgery—someone threw that in for good measure. I protested, hey, I didn’t have that! They dutifully removed it after I asked the second time. I imagined them thinking, How does he know he hasn’t had it? Maybe we sneaked that one in with the knee replacement. With all honesty, I just about needed that at one time.
In a conservative estimate, I threw 10,000 pitches playing baseball between the ages of 9 and 17, and played shortstop with its challenging throws otherwise, and my right elbow and shoulder have been the only joints not in pain. When I reported this to my dear old orthopedic man, Dr. Helming, he looked at me owlishly and said, “That’s a miracle.” Then I tried to take a heavy tray of pizza out of the oven one-handed. Ouch! Rotator cuff. Physical therapy.
So though I regret my physical breakdown, I have wonderful memories of years and years of baseball, faculty and law firm softball, tennis, golf, touch football, playground basketball, whatever everyone was playing, I could do it. My father, a true natural athlete, wanted us to be able to join in whatever the sport of the day was.
I averaged striking out about a quarter to a third of everyone I faced. I could throw my fastball past people and if not I had a changeup curve that fooled everyone. I can still see Dave Seybert wincing as he swung fruitlessly, realized that he’d fallen for it. After the game, Dave asked, “You had a good curve tonight, didn’t’ you?” One has memories to fill in the recent gaps, and that memory is 55 years old. When you’ve had that much fun, you can’t resent not having it anymore.
No kidding, though, being in pain every minute of every day takes it out of you. I’m envious of Nancy and Kate’s hikes in the Olympics or even shopping in downtown Victoria: I can’t stay on my feet more than three minutes without pain now. But what the hey, I don’t like shopping anyway. There are compensations; I can go back to the hotel and read in front of the fire. Ooh, and you say that there’s a bar around the corner?
On the minus side, I’ve become less tolerant of other people. I asked my treasured therapist, Larry Galpert, if I were a sociopath, and he said, no, I just didn’t suffer fools gladly. When I see the oldsters in my condo complex blocking the exit driveway because they’re talking, I go from zero to furious in two seconds. It shouldn’t be a problem that I don’t suffer fools gladly except that I think that just about everyone I encounter is a fool.
I have a lot of regrets for a life lived badly: I published very little fiction, didn’t become a tenured professor of English, had to become a lawyer, a profession for which I was really unsuited, so never made partner or General Counsel. And my marriage didn’t work out. Those regrets used to consume me. Then Larry helped me learn to live with them. I felt serene, content, as of November, 2022. I just had to solve this back problem.
Then this year, when the pain I was suffering appeared intractable, incurable, I became frustrated and easily irritated. The doctors can’t agree even on what’s wrong much less how to fix it. Meanwhile I am in pain every minute of every day. I wish the docs could experience that. Then they might not end a call with, “Well, hang in there!”
But I’m striving towards that contentedness again. One thing we can all say is, well, my city isn’t being shelled. Imagine living through that. We are so fucking lucky.
Then, then, just as I was settling into a quiet, lonely retirement, what should happen but an old friend from high school, Jeff McChristian, whom I hadn’t had contact since the 1990’s, wrote to say that he was coming to a music workshop in Port Orchard and could he stop by.
In the months before he visited, we emailed and talked on the phone. We had a fine time catching up; he’s become like a brother. We both had toxic mothers, were lawyers, had the same firmly held beliefs about politics and the law. Then the spider web expanded and a while ago we had a Zoom call amongst five of us old high school friends. I hadn’t spoken to two of them in 50 years, the others for 30.
This is deeply weird and, if you haven’t tried it, I advise you do so. One woman, Debbie Byrd, taught English lit at Lafayette for 42 years and just retired. Her father was an all-American basketball player at WVU and then later got a doctorate in my father’s department, where they must have met. Both families moved to Florida, coincidentally, in 1966 or so. Debbie and I had one date, and I don’t think it went well on either side. Nevertheless, her sweet mother called us “our little scholars.”
After the initial five-person Zoom meeting, Debbie and I had a one-on-one Zoom call, and when she asked me if I’d kept up with the others, I admitted that I’d been so deeply depressed through the 90’s and so convinced of my own mediocrity that I couldn’t bear talking to them, considering how successful they seemed to be. What surprised me, but shouldn’t have, was Debbie’s reaction: her face crinkled up in a sad frown.
My old friends are so kind now. They weren’t mean in high school, but you know how there’s an adolescent level of teasing that might tend to make someone like me shut up about my failings. When I talk to these friends now, the hard edges are worn off. They are so kind and compassionate. Jeff and a law school friend, Malcolm, are the nicest men I know, and the latter, the more we talk, may be the smartest.
I become vertiginous. I see them on my computer screen and imagine them 50 years ago, the last time I saw them. I have nothing in mind about them from then to now. Yet here we all are. I’m grateful for my high school friends, such a surprising late life gift.
At 70, I can say that I’ve lived a very lucky life. Though we’re separated, I love Nancy as much as ever, maybe more as we’ve relaxed. I told Kate, who’s the best kid ever and a wonderful human being, that I thanked her for all of the conversations we never had to have (I stole that from my old boss Robert, who told me that—what a great boss and still a good friend!)
I told Nancy that I could die happy having contributed albeit in a small way to the production of a truly superior human being. Nancy contributed the best genetics and the lion share of the effort. I contributed not behaving like my mother, which is not nothing.
I’m grateful for a late in life understanding that though I didn’t succeed in publishing fiction (still a chance!), and our law and society books didn’t sell, I don’t have to see myself as a failure. I can really write. My blog is evidence. I’m not a failure after all.
I can die whenever nature wants me to. I don’t have to prove anything, and I’ve succeeded in what matters, I think: fatherhood, and being a friend, and, despite the separation, a devoted husband. Other than softball umpires and coaches, I don’t think anyone hates me. Though I was a mediocre lawyer, I somehow never got sued. That’s a comfort. I’m still growing: Kate doesn’t think I’m a racist anymore, and, as I say, I’m content. After a life of thinking I’m a failure, that’s growth.
Yearbook editor-in-chief at work, circa 1970 (I bet Mike Crowley took this.)
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