Delia Marshall Turner's Blog, page 11

Winning the game

I find my way inside, and here,
upon a dais, arranged, there lie
two bodies, side by side. One is
a cat. The other is a man I met
and married, early on.

I’ve solved
the labyrinth. I’ve answered it.
There should be fireworks. Instead,
far off, I hear
a slam–

–the outside door has closed! I won,
but that means I’m not playing
any more. It’s done. It’s won.
I pull a chair up, sit, and wait
and watch

the credits roll. I like to know
if there will be another scene
before the end, or if I have
to start another game.

Persistence

I have been reviewing my old journals, under the theory that I (a) finally have the free time (b) have been keeping a journal for some decades (c) might as well. A number of thoughts:

I have been impulsive all my life. I get wonderful ideas, and then I act on them, without any intervening consideration. And then, because I decided in my twenties that I should work on being consistent, I persist in pursuing my wonderful ideas. For decades. I am not sure this is sensible. It’s too late to reconsider now.When I examine my childhood, my early adulthood, and my current life, I reflect that I am the same person I was when I was completely dysfunctional. I just completely accepted the quirks of my brain at some point, and that has made all the difference. My advice to people who keep journals and photographs with the idea of getting around to reviewing and organizing them some day, and perhaps of putting together a memoir or a set of scrapbooks that you can leaf through when you are old and gray? THROW MOST OF IT OUT before you start. Please, I beg you. One year, I went through all my mother’s files, photographs, sermons, and reflections, which I stored in my cellar. It was long after she died. The process aggravated my allergies, and I did not know who most of the people were. She was too ill to tackle it herself before it was too late, so I forgive her. The problem with organization systems, for the terminally disorganized, is that you keep adding new ones and then you need an organization system to keep track of your organization systems, because you forget where you put that list. Also, put not your faith in apps or cloud storage. People talk about keeping gratitude lists to cheer them up. I prefer grievance lists. They are much more entertaining, and they have great explanatory power. It can be reassuring to know that I had a very good reason for being overwhelmed when I was in my fifties, for example. I regret very little, because apparently I have done everything that ever occurred to me. What a ridiculous life it has been so far.

THERE WILL BE A QUIZ

I have been reading through my journals and blog entries lately because I have the idea of writing a short autobiography to give my adult kid. It’s really an excuse to read through decades of memories, now that I have the time.

My students used to read an abridged version of the Trojan War in sixth grade English, and by the eighth or ninth time I had taught it, I knew it by heart. I got the Reading Teacher to take over teaching it in 2011 so I could teach some other things.

One day when the Reading teacher was out and the Internet was down, I had to sub for her but couldn’t use her lesson plan depending on online access, so instead, I gave the following talk, illustrating it on the whiteboard as I spoke and announcing, “There will be a quiz” before I started.

Zeus had a son, Tantalus, who cooked and served his son Pelops to the gods.  They realized it and condemned Tantalus to Hades where he was up to his neck in water that drained away when he tried to drink, with a bunch of grapes that pulled itself away when he tried to eat.  The gods brought Pelops back to life, and Pelops killed Hippodamia’s father in order to marry Hippodamia.  Pelops and Hippodamia had two children, Thyestes and Atreus.  Atreus married Aerope, but Thyestes had an affair with Aerope, so Atreus killed and cooked Thyestes’ two sons and served them up.  Thyestes vowed vengeance and ran away with his daughter Pelopia, having a son, Aegisthus, by her.  Don’t forget Aegisthus.  Pelops also had a sister, Niobe, who bragged that her seven sons and seven daughters were REALLY SPECIAL, so the gods turned her into a WEEPING ROCK.  MEANWHILE, Atreus and Aerope had two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus.

And MEANWHILE, Zeus had an affair with Leda while he was pretending to be a swan, and though she was married to Tyndareus, Leda laid two eggs, each of which hatched to produce twins:  Castor and Pollux, and Helen and Clytemnestra.

WHEREUPON (imagine me drawing lines and arrows and family trees) Menelaus married Helen, who was his great-great-grandfather’s daughter.  Agamemnon married Helen’s sister Clytemnestra, and had three children:  Iphigenia, Orestes, and Electra.  Helen ran away with Paris, and Agamemnon and Menelaus went after her.  On the way, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the gods so he could have a fair wind.  Ten years passed, during which Paris died and Helen married somebody else.

AND MEANWHILE, Aegisthus (remember him?) was having an affair with Clytemnestra, who was SERIOUSLY ANNOYED with Agamemnon for sacrificing their daughter.  In other words, she was fooling around with her husband’s cousin because her husband killed their daughter. 

The war ends.  Agamemnon brings home Cassandra, the sister of Paris, the guy who stole his brother’s wife.  Cassandra is condemned to always know the future and never be believed, so she’s all like BLOOD DEATH DESPAIR DON’T GO IN THAT HOUSE, but nobody listens.  Clytemnestra welcomes Agamemnon with open arms, draws him a bath, takes his armor and his sword, and HACKS HIM TO DEATH IN THE BATHTUB.  She does Cassandra in while she’s at it.  And Orestes, who was out of town, comes home and KILLS HIS MOTHER.  AND GOES BONKERS.  And Helen and Menelaus live happily ever after. 

Quiz question:  HOW IS NIOBE RELATED TO AEGISTHUS?

As you might imagine, this talk, which takes about five minutes at high speed without an audience, takes fifteen with an audience because of the cries of “Wait.  That’s not right!” and “No!” and the feverish attempts of some of the students to slow me down so they can take notes.  By the end of it, the class is pretty raucous and they have gained a new appreciation of all things Ancient Greek because, as someone said today, the story is better than “Jersey Shore.” 

Sometimes I miss teaching

This is from my 2004 teaching journal:

Yesterday, I found myself relating the events of the House of Atreus as if it were the plot of a soap opera: “King Atreus whacked his brother’s kids, all except . . . Aegisthus! Meanwhile, Atreus had two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, and they married sisters – Clytemnestra and Helen. Now Agamememnon and Clytemnestra had Iphigenia and Orestes, and Agamemnon whacked Iphigenia in order to get a fair wind for the Greek fleet . . . and Clytemnestra never forgave him. Never. Meanwhile, Paris has stolen Menelaus’s wife, who is Clytemnestra’s sister, and Agamemnon and Menelaus go off to Troy for ten years to get her back. There, Paris’s brother Hector is whacked, and then Paris, and Helen marries somebody else. . . who is whacked . . . and marries somebody else . . . who is whacked . . . and then the war in Troy is over, and Menelaus finds Helen, and . . .

And the boys shout, “. . . Whacks her!”

“No,” I say, “They sail off together and live happily ever after.” And all the boys look disappointed, but I continue, drawing arrows all over the board and crossing out the people who get killed, “Meanwhile, Agamemnon heads home, with Cassandra . . . who is Paris’s sister . . . and his wife Clytemnestra, meanwhile, has been hanging out with . . . (dramatic pause) Aegisthus!”

The boys go “Oooh!”

“Clytemnestra meets Agamemnon on the palace steps . . . “

And the boys shout, “And she whacks him!”

“No, she says, ‘Welcome home, honey! Here’s a red carpet. How about a bath? Take off those heavy weapons,’ and THEN she throws a net over him and whacks him, with an axe, in the bathtub. Blood everywhere. And then she whacks Cassandra, who is standing outside prophesying her own death.”

The boys all look very impressed as I cross out those names with a big black X. “And then . . . Orestes returns! And he kills Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. And nobody is left alive except . . . “

“Helen and Menelaus! And Orestes!” chorus the boys, looking at all the arrows, bubbles, and big black Xs on the board.

Fallor Ego Sum

Twenty years ago (in a reunion year, of course), my private girls school decided to call me its Alumna of the Year.

My first reaction was to take personal offense, for complicated reasons. One reason is my absurd personality, because I like achievement but hate awards. Another reason was that I hated the school when I went there.

As a student, I got terrible grades, didn’t do my homework, and disappointed everyone all the time.

As an adult, I redefined my definition of success. And now here they were saying “Good job!” as if I had somehow come around. It was annoying.

When I went to drop off my photo and bio to the Alumna Office, I ran into someone who told me she was glad the award wasn’t going to an investment banker, and I realized I wasn’t alone in my sense of incongruity. Then it occurred to me that, because I was expected to give a talk to the student body, I could say some of that. Here’s what I said to the students:

I am astonished to be getting this award. The author G.K. Chesterton once described someone slightingly as the kind of person who believed that “anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” and I take that as my motto. I cannot tell you how many challenges I have taken on, undeterred by the fact that I wasn’t very good at them. Apparently the law of averages has resulted in my doing a few of those things well. Someone asked me the other day how I had done so many different things in my life, and I answered, “Inability to focus.”

When I called the Alumnae Office (to ask them if I were getting this award by mistake), they told me that I was going to have to speak to all of you. They said I should talk about how Baldwin affected the direction of my life or on issues facing young women. My daughter, who graduated from Baldwin in 2000, gave me some even better advice. She said, “Keep it brief, Mom. Be yourself. Be obnoxious.” I took that to heart.

How did Baldwin affect my life? It taught me to think critically and to write clearly. It taught me that if I had something to say, it deserved to be said, even if nobody listened. It taught me that I usually wasn’t working up to my potential.

I had some wonderful teachers, and some classmates who all seemed to be so much better at everything than I was, and to know what they wanted to do with their lives. I had a lot of people who believed in me, and who refused to give up on me, and who were quite sure I was capable of much more than I actually did, and who thought I ought to be doing something different than what I was doing. I successfully disappointed quite a number of them, I think, and continued to do so for many years.

So when I thought about what I might have to say to Baldwin students . . .

First: Some of you don’t know what you want to do, and you don’t understand what everybody wants from you. You don’t feel as if you belong here. You’re working hard but none of it makes sense. People keep telling you that you have potential, and you are pretty sure they’re wrong. You think you’re the only person who feels that way. You’re not.

Some of you are quite sure you know what you want to do, and that you are going to excel. You know you belong at Baldwin, and that it is preparing you for a bright future. You think everybody here feels that way. They don’t.

Look around you and remember that if high school is the best years of your life, you’re going downhill.

Second: Don’t be afraid to try something even when you don’t know how to do it, even when you know you’re not good at it. Fear of failure is an affliction of the successful. Sometimes people go to the best schools, the best graduate schools, get the best and most powerful jobs, because they’re afraid that to do anything else would be failure. You are allowed to fail. Some of the most successful people did a lot of things wrong before they did them right. Find out what challenges you, not what interests other people, and try doing that.

I write because I love writing. I teach because I love teaching. I fence because tricking people so you can hit them is tremendous fun for me. I don’t know what I’m going to be doing ten years from now, either. Just because I’m good at these things, doesn’t mean I have to do them for the rest of my life.

In other words: Anything that is worth doing, is worth doing. Whether you do it well or badly in the beginning, whether it’s what other people think you should be doing, it’s worth it. And if it turns out you don’t like doing that, do something else instead.

Thank you.

The headmistress, an implacable figure who had arrived long after I did, sat in the back with her arms folded, glaring.

But by the third line of my talk, the girls began to laugh.

When I said, “Look around you and remember that if high school is the best years of your life, you’re going downhill,” I had to pause because they began applauding and wouldn’t stop. By the end, though I ended abruptly, they gave me a big hand. Afterwards, a couple of the girls came up and said, “That was the only time we have ever enjoyed one of these talks,” and I knew I had done my job.

Last Big Things

Across the street, a woman walking a dog with her partner called out, “You need any help?”

“Nah,” I said, my fingers clutching the mattress side strap through the plastic. “This is a matter of sliding, not lifting.”

“You sure?” she said, because after all I am a woman with gray hair and wrinkles, a woman who was dragging an extra-thick twin mattress out my front door in the early evening.

“I got this, thanks!” I said, and the mattress, succumbing, popped out the door and started bumping down and onto the sidewalk. I shoved it over to the trash cans that were already out for trash pick-up the next morning, and went back inside to pet the cat.

It was after the weekly family dinner. My grown kid and the grandchild and son-in-law had gone home, and I had gone down to the basement to slide the mattress up the cellar stairs, through the house, and out the front. I had the feeling this mattress deserved my full attention. I didn’t even tell my kid I was going to do it, though they guessed I had something planned for when they left. They would have helped. But I wanted to honor the occasion by doing it myself, and to prove to myself that I could, before I hit the age where that kind of thing could result in a broken hip.

See, the mattress was the Last Big Thing, the final important object to leave the house since my husband died, almost exactly six months to the day.

It was going out in the trash, wrapped in plastic. No one wants mattresses, even when they’re only a year old, because of the possibility of body fluids, dust mites, and bedbugs, even though the brown stain on this one was from when my dying husband spilled a bottle of Ensure, not from blood.

I had gotten rid of everything now.

It took trips to Goodwill, to the dump, to a charity called The Diaper Project that was willing to take two cases of Depends. It took hiring junk removal companies who overcharged, to take the few things that I couldn’t throw out myself or donate. I got rid of clothes, furniture, and everything we had to pick up to get him through being terminally ill during a pandemic. I used Buy Nothing to donate everything he and I had acquired that I didn’t need any more. I kept photos of him, and some of his possessions, and I missed him every day, but I was not going to try to carry the weight of all his things any more, not when it wouldn’t do any good. Not when it would make things harder down the line.

After I got the mattress out Thursday night, and after my shower, I got dressed in my jeans again and slept on top of my coverlet under a quilt.

That’s what I do when Things Get Big.

I used to sleep that way in college, when my damn fool parents let me go away when I had just turned seventeen and was already an active alcoholic, when they were getting ready for the divorce, when the world was going up in flames during the Vietnam War. It’s what I did when I was first getting sober. I slept that way while my husband was dying in our house, and while I was taking care of him, and after he finally died, too. My brain seems to need the reassurance that I can leap out of bed and be ready to run.

The mattress was gone by noon yesterday, because I have been putting some of the Big Things out once a week instead of all at once, because sanitation workers can handle all kinds of things if I don’t expect them to do it all at once.

Sleeping on top of the coverlet wasn’t because of the mattress. It was because the day before that, Wednesday, I got rid of the Next-To-Last Big Thing, and that Thing was a doozy, as my father would say.

The Very Big Next-to-Last Thing was my little car.

A car costs money just by existing, what with insurance, parking permits, registration, inspection, repairs, anger, and anxiety. It wears out the world and causes waste. It requires attention, protection, and fear. Giving it up signifies dependence. It is a Very Big Thing.

But big things come at a cost. Not too long ago, for instance, I heard a weird noise, and went out. Two guys in ski masks were removing catalytic converters on my block. I scared them away before they took mine, but I’ve had my share of break-ins. I don’t need that worry any more, and I don’t need the transportation, not really. I live in a city where the transportation is decent, and I have a senior citizen bus pass. I’m not actually too old to keep driving, not yet, but why should I wait?

Therefore, Wednesday, I drove the car to the dealership where I bought it eight years ago. I knew what its Blue Book value was, and how much CarMax had offered me for it, but I also wanted the sale to go quickly and I wanted to catch the train home. I’m not a complete patsy, mind you (I think even my father wouldn’t say “patsy.” Maybe my grandfather). When the car salesman offered me four thousand less, I told him, “That’s not acceptable.”

“Well, what do you want for it?”

I named a figure and he almost levitated from his chair, repeating my number in mock horror. I looked at him with interest. He was a neat guy with a Turkish name and a shock of graying hair.

“You could cry,” I said.

“I will,” he said earnestly, and then he said tentatively, “How much money do you need?” as if he was going to bargain me down further.

What I needed, more than money, was to get rid of my car and catch a train home, and to stop paying for insurance or worrying about an eighteen-wheeler deciding to hit every other car on the street when it got detoured, like last fall. I gave him the same figure.

The salesman looked at me. He knew and I knew that it was a reasonable figure. Then he got up and went into the back, and got me a check for the number I had told him, which was less than I could have gotten for it, but you see, if you are willing to slide instead of lift, you can move mountains. I would have been perfectly happy to donate the car to charity if he hadn’t been willing, because that would have been easier and still would have saved me money.

Facing that I’m getting older is hard, don’t get me wrong. And spending months purging everything sounds extraordinarily difficult, now that I think about it. But possessions are heavy. They are weights. Each object–my husband’s desk, my massive bureau, the vinyl gloves, the incontinence bed-pads, the electronics–carried the weight not only of physical mass but of attachment. Giving possessions away was easier, one at a time. I don’t get to avoid doing the hard things, but accepting they have to be done is freeing. A long time ago, someone told me, “The only way out is through,” and that’s when I found out that putting things off until I can do them properly takes a lot more work in the long run than facing them and doing them bit by bit.

Yeah, I’m aware I didn’t actually do it the easy way. Wrestling a mattress up the cellar stairs is dumb as hell. It was lonely, and a little scary when the thing got stuck on the landing and I was between the mattress and the banister. But I did it myself, instead of having to accept someone else doing it for me, you see. That will come. But for now, I could do it myself. Now it’s gone, the Very Last Big Thing.

Or at least, the very last big thing for now.

Savings

The first electrician I called to put in an outlet for an electric stove brought a box of doughnuts for me, which made me wary. I was right to be wary. He (an employee of a big firm) did his free 25-point checkup and informed me (an older lady on her own in a big very tidy house with clean recently re-upholstered furniture) that my circuit breaker box was maxed out and needed to be replaced, along with the wiring from the outside, before he could even think of running a line to the kitchen for a stove. He gave me an estimate (which he generated and emailed me from his truck afterwards) that would have meant I was eating rice and beans for the next six months. So, because I still have a perfectly fine gas stove and I am not the exact kind of older lady he thought I was, I called another electrician for a second estimate.

The second guy didn’t bring a free box of doughnuts. Instead, he brought his wonderful chatty self. After he looked through my wiring, he sat down at my kitchen table with his estimate form, and we talked for half an hour.

What did we talk about?

He used to be a respiratory technician but his family was all electricians, so when he needed a new career it was easy to make the switch. In his job, he sees a lot of people who believe the weirdest things. He says it’s like they have no common sense, no way to do a reality check any more. I told him about the carpenter who did my downstairs bathroom, who told me in a hushed and uneasy voice that he suspected my husband had voted for Biden. The electrician’s wife has cancer and he never thought she was going to go before him. I told him I was married for 46 years before Stephen died, and that’s about as good as it can get. We nodded at one another. He sees people with piles of photographs completely unsorted and they’re never going to get around to identifying and sharing all of them. It’s sad. He and I have both digitized all our photos and shared them with our kids. You ought to be able to commit suicide when you’re terminally ill, he said. I suspect he just wanted to get out before his wife goes. I told him about my mother and refusing to eat, and my mother-in-law taking what we suspect was an overdose of blood thinner. I’m right to go all electric, he told me. That’s the way it’s going. No one is going to use gas any more. We both nodded sagely. Hell if I know.Of all the many announced candidates for Philadelphia mayor, he likes the guy who owned the Shop-Rites because we don’t need another politician. I said I hadn’t made up my mind yet, but the current guy is just tired of being mayor. We nodded sagely again. At that point, I finally went into the kitchen and ran my coffee grinder to make him stop talking so he could write his two-sentence estimate.

He’s charging me about a third of what the first guy wanted, for the same work, because my circuit box is maxed out.

I will pay a price for my savings, though. I will have to take my hearing aid out and perhaps hide on the third floor when he comes over, because otherwise we will talk and no work will get done.

The thing that stuck with me (aside from great relief, because red beans and rice should stay an occasional treat) was what he said about the photos. I too know a lot of people who have saved piles of photos, who are waiting until the right time to sit down and reflect. There is no right time. The time is now.

I don’t just have photos. I have diaries. I write in a journal every day, and have for a few decades. At one point I had about forty full composition books, but then I realized they were taking up way too much space. When I tell friends that, their first reaction is to panic and tell me never to throw them out, as if my musings are the National Archives or some kind of immortality. I say it’s too late, because I already got rid of all of them, but I reassure them that I have kept excerpts.

I don’t write to memorialize anything. My journal is not a record. It’s a mixing bowl, maybe, or a toybox full of things I will never play with, fascinating to explore periodically. It’s not an attic, it’s more like a bulletin board. It’s a way to process what is preoccupying me. I have pages upon pages describing my various organization systems, or writing about my mother’s illness or my husband’s, or putting yesterday’s events in order so I can understand why I’m feeling the way I am. I’ve written short stories in my journal, and even big chunks of novels, but mostly I just write what’s in my head. I make a list of what the electrician and I talked about. Then I say, “Oh,” and I put the journal away until the next day.

Occasionally there’s a paragraph I want to keep, so I type it up and add it to a file, but when it comes time to review what I’ve kept, maybe a tenth of that is worth holding onto. Or not even that much.

As the electrician and I agreed, people believe some weird shit, when things get bad you can do something else instead, no one has the answers, electric is the future, and we’re all gonna die eventually anyway, so go through your photos and your diaries now. And don’t trust people who give you a free box of fresh doughnuts. Get a second estimate.

Rational as all get-out

I’m not terribly spiritual. Given the immensity and implacability of the universe, and the illogicality of believing in a personal deity who just happens to adhere to my church’s particular dogma, I just can’t bring myself to believe in the Numinous Aura of Everything. I especially can’t buy into the idea of any kind of afterlife. Historically, in my church, the original idea was a resurrection, not a Caribbean resort of the deceased, but people have gotten invested in the idea of an upstairs/downstairs pair of departure lounges.

It’s just the way my brain is configured. Believe me, I’ve tried. I got confirmed in the Episcopal Church, I read the Bible cover to cover, and I sought solace in Taoism and Zen Buddhism. In the end, though I meditate every day, and though I cheerfully pray every day to be kind, content, and present, it’s more of a practical habit than any kind of fervency on my part.

Just now, I got back from another visit to my late husband’s grave. I saw him dead, mind you, and I watched him die for a very long time before that in hospice; it looked extremely final after the end when he lay there with his eyeballs sinking in and his mouth agape. I told hospice to notify the funeral home, and they cremated him, taking off his wedding ring and getting it to me as I asked. I watched someone put the box of his ashes in his little cremation plot, to the accompaniment of a nice service that he would have approved of. His stone plaque arrived much earlier than they told me it would. It has his name and the dates of his birth and death on it. I took care of him, as I told him I would. He took comfort in the fact that it was a pretty place and that there is room for my ashes and for my name and dates too. It was for his sake, while he was dying, that I took care of everything and told him about it.

But the human brain is nothing if not a human brain, and every time I go, I stand there and start to cry. I talk to him. I call him an asshole and son-of-a-bitch for leaving me, which is pretty much how I would put it to his face because it would have made him snicker. Today, I told him about donating most of the bedding I bought while he was sick. Having a hospital bed downstairs and a bed upstairs when he was incontinent would have meant one hell of a lot of hasty laundry. Now I don’t need it, I said. I told him I’m trying to donate his twin bed to a second hand furniture place. I commented that I didn’t realize he asked me to take over the bill-paying in the 90s; I didn’t think it was that long ago. He used to twist himself in knots about the bills.

I told him his kid misses him, and said it was funny how he and his kid both avoided the subject of his death around each other, when neither one of them is terribly sentimental. I didn’t mention the porn I found yesterday in one of his detachable hard drives, because he had told me he got rid of it all before he died and it would have embarrassed him to know he messed up. I deleted it all, as he intended, but I didn’t bother him with the fact.

I worried that he was cold, there in the ground, and lonely. I didn’t want to leave him there, even though he’s a crunchy clump of ashes in a cardboard box inside a vault.

Yeah, no. Brains, man. Human beings. We don’t make sense. I got in my car and drove away crying, and when I got home I scheduled my next visit.

Hobbyhorse

The etymology of the word “hobby” derives from a child’s toy rocking-horse, in the sense of something that doesn’t go anywhere. However, I think of a hobby as something I spend money on but that I’m not good at yet.

I’m all hobbies, in the sense of passion and obsession without necessity or (in the beginning) fluency. There’s something about taking up an activity and mastering it that brings me irrational joy, that puts me in a flow state. But then, often, I stop doing it, sometimes in a short time, sometimes after decades, because when I really know what I’m doing it isn’t as much fun any more.

My professions have all been hobbies, really. I went to art school, for instance, because I loved drawing. Thus, my bachelor’s is in fine arts, but I only practiced as an artist for a few years, having achieved what I wanted. Before I ever taught, I went to grad school for a master’s degree in elementary education, then a doctorate in research on teaching. The whole idea of how human brains work was absorbing and I found it interesting. That interest lasted longer. After thirty years of teaching every grade from pre-K through college and every subject from English to math to science, though, I told my boss I was getting bored and needed a change, and he didn’t understand until too late that I meant it. Yes, the job paid me, but I did it because it was interesting.

I wrote some books because that was tremendous fun, too, and because it was ridiculously hard. I made some money writing, not much. That took me some interesting places. I was invited to speak at the Library of Congress. I did book conventions, and did readings in bookstores. I got nominated for awards. I have spent far more on writing than I have made, though. I still write, mind you. I haven’t given that up. It continues to be frustrating enough to be worthwhile.

Other activities didn’t keep my interest as long. I have done most kinds of needlework, run a marathon, collected vintage fountain pens, and taken an assortment of classes. I take fluent shorthand, can run a table saw and glue a joint, and I have been a professional self-taught calligrapher, among the things I can remember at the moment.

The most expensive undertaking was learning to fence, in my forties. That’s when I first really understood what I was looking for in a hobby. That is, apparently, that I wanted to feel afraid and stupid, and I wanted to struggle for a long time. Fencing is fun, but it’s also quite difficult, and it’s very counter-intuitive. For the first couple of years, I used to take my weekly lesson and then go outside and shout on the front sidewalk, “I have no idea what you’re talking about!” And then I would go back in and try some more.

The funny thing was, I gradually began to know what I was doing, and as a result I have traveled all over the country and abroad, competing in national and international events. I have baskets full of medals, and a plaque that lists my eleven medals in Over-50 World Championships, including four age-group gold medals. I have another pile of medals in open competition. I’m getting a Lifetime Achievement Award on Friday at another national event.

Unfortunately, I’m finally getting a little bored. I am tired of traveling for tournaments. I don’t like plane flight that much, and if I’m traveling I would seriously like to be able to sightsee instead of spending days in a dingy sports hall with people I see over and over. I also don’t have as much disposable income as I used to, and I’d like to get rid of my car. So the other day, I posted an Ask on Metafilter, to see what new hobbies someone might suggest to someone over seventy who likes challenges.

The responses were great, including such things as learning an instrument, rope work, card tricks, weaving, geocaching, bicycling, community government, gardening, learning to program, square dance, repairing things, sign language, wood carving, pickleball, and restoring furniture.

As I read, I kept noticing that I’ve alread tried out a bunch of the things they suggested. I don’t play pickleball, but I played tennis when it was popular, and then racquetball when that was popular. Not hard enough. I have studied art, and I have square danced. I’m politically active, and have participated in numerous actions and demonstrations. I have carved wood, restored furniture, and done all kinds of crafts. I gave away my bicycle not long ago, because I live in a city where bicycling is more dangerous than driving and not only that, it felt boring.

I have tried to learn the piano, and I sang with my daughter and sang in a choir, but though I come from a musical family, I am pretty bad at music. That makes a musical instrument one of my main choices, of course. But I’m not sure I’m bad enough at it to make it into a new hobby.

The other thing that appealed to me of the suggestions is computer programming. Now, I have been trying to learn to program since, oh, 1967. (We had a little class in it when I was in high school.) I have kept trying since then. Mostly, though, I’ve just concentrated on being computer literate rather than on programming. I almost bought one of the first personal computers in the late 70s, because I was fascinated with the word processor I was learning to use, and I did buy one in the eighties. I was a heck of a DOS jockey, and I hand-coded my own website in HTML, using frames and then CSS. Then the software began to catch up, and it got easier to use someone else’s tools. I was a very early Internet adopter, and I have abandoned more social media sites than I can list on two hands (the most recent being Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter of course). (My new Mastodon handle is @howrawhowrue@mindly.social). As I used to say to our tech support people, I’m a very competent user. But programming? I suck at that. I have displayed the word “Hello” in a dozen programming languages, and that was about as far as I got.

Sounds perfect. I’ll give it a try.

Knowing myself, though, I will find out suddenly that while I was thinking about that, I have taken up an entirely different hobby already, and am sucking terribly at that instead.

The thought fills me with anticipation.

I’ll never forget how much I’ve forgotten

A former friend from high school who was doing some “Swedish death cleaning” sent me a scan of a letter I wrote her from France in 1971. It begins: “We are now in Fecamp, and it’s so wonderful being here I know I’ll never forget it.” I go on in the letter to describe my visit in vivid detail.

I don’t remember any of that.

I know I backpacked in Europe for two months when I was 19 and met up with my boyfriend half way through, but I don’t remember visiting Fecamp with him. Later in the letter I say, “It was very strange being there, because I remembered being there before when I was 12 – but it was more like a story someone had told me than something I had actually experienced.”

I do remember that earlier visit: My grandmother took me and my cousin John to England and Scotland and then to France, where we joined up with my aunt and her three daughters in Fecamp.

I do have a travel journal from that 1964 trip to spark my memory, except that I wrote down things I don’t remember and didn’t write down the things I do remember.

We apparently visited the Tower of London, Selfridges, and Hampton Court when we were in London. That’s news to me. I named the towns we visited on the bus tour we took, but I have no recollection of them.

I remember much better what I didn’t dare write down. I was certain my grandmother or my cousin would snoop in the journal and I really didn’t want them to know. So I described two people on our tour bus as “dear, dear ladies” when I know they actually seemed creepy to me. One of them had a skin tag on her face I was sure was going to fall off any moment.

I didn’t write anything at all from Fecamp, where I was much less supervised and could sneak red wine and wallow in 12-year-old despair to my heart’s content. I do remember that, all too well, though it was a pretty town with a nice pebbly beach and we were staying in a lovely big house. I was incredibly lonely, and my parents were at the peak of their bitter fights about me, but being in my grandmother’s care was not an escape. It was a torment. I remember that much.

But I also remember how nice the beach was, and I remember the pastries someone sold in a shack nearby, and that the old house we were renting in Fecamp had an actual moat. I remember my cousin Sarah practicing Bartok on the piano. I remember the scent of Bain de Soleil, which didn’t have any sunblock in it but smelled like oranges.

I have been thinking lately about writing a short memoir. It would be a little gift to my kid and my grandchild. But I would like it to be at least moderately truthful. I have an autobiography my mother wrote with the help of a volunteer in her last year or two in the retirement community. Some of it is undoubtedly accurate. The bits I was present for are warped and sometimes wrong, so I don’t know how much I can trust it.

I realize this is pretty normal. My husband and I, for instance, used to have intense arguments about events we had experienced together. We were both quite sure we were right and the other person was wrong. He’s gone now, so I guess I win? But I have a recording of him telling his life story, thank goodness, even though I actually disagree with a few things he says about his later life.

Everything I know about memory tells me that when you read about someone’s life in a memoir, you are reading a reconstruction or even a partial fabrication, made of whatever the writer decided to retain.

Unlike many people, I’ve kept a diary of some sort off and on since that summer, so if I want to write a memoir, I could actually check to see if I’m telling the truth. Unless, of course, I was lying in the diary, which is always possible. I don’t remember, off hand, if I lied in my diary any time except the summer of 1964.

But whatever I choose to write, it will be more like a story I have told myself than something I have actually experienced.