The cold day I was naked in Utah
The writing life is such a good life that I’m grateful all over again that I paid no attention in 11th grade Chemistry and didn’t become a pharmacist and got kicked out of Industrial Arts for being careless with power tools and was sent up to Speech and LaVona Person and recited original limericks for Oral Interp and made the class laugh and thus went down the literary highway. And now I’m hobbling with a cane after a bad fall, one more excuse to not go out to big fundraising dinners but stay home and work on a screenplay. I’m on page 38 and already there are three funerals, it’s a sure hit, a comedy, I need to have my tux let out for the awards ceremony.
Everyone has their story and mine is that fall. I was walking into a recording studio in Midtown and didn’t see a step and stumbled and crashed. My own fault. Banged up the left knee but a man doesn’t write with his knee and the pain of putting weight on it only highlights the great good luck of my life starting with this long marriage to my friend and lover who, thank God, is back in Minnesota, rehearsing for an opera, and not here worrying about an old man with a bad limp.
Plus which, I didn’t bang my head so I can still recite Shakespeare’s sonnet about getting old, ending with the lines, “This thou perceiv’st which makes thy love more strong: to love that well which thou must leave ere long.” So true, so true. Past 80, the days become so beautiful, even a day on which you fall. Miss Helen Story, my old English teacher, adored Shakespeare and thanks to her, I was given him on a plate, so it saddens me that liberal arts colleges are in decline and kids are denied poetry in favor of computer science, it’s tragic.
Computer science, my darlings, is a skill and it keeps changing as technology speeds ahead and so majoring in computer science is majoring in obsolescence, but “That time of year thou mayst in me behold when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” is art and pure perfection, and you, my dear child in an English-speaking land, have a sacred right to know it.
Someday a genius will come up with a computer that can sing and dance and complete your sentences and talk you out of your misapprehensions and the genius will rearrange the QWERTYUIOP keyboard and everyone over the age of 40, unable to retrain, will fall into obsolescence but poetry will endure, such as Bill’s Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state,” in which two-thirds of the poem is devoted to his grievous troubles and then the poem remembers you, the loved one, “for thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings that then I scorn to change my state with kings.”
Friendship is what it’s all about, especially when you’re old.
The young are hip and wildly funny and in tune with the times and admired by thousands of followers but when you get old and boring like me, Mr. Jerry Attrick, you appreciate your old friends more and more. I leave Ukraine and the warming oceans and the fever of Christian fascism to smarter people and I call up friends and say, “How are you doing?” and we reminisce about life’s ups and downs and I tell the story of the luxury home I once rented for a few days in January in Utah and one cold morning went out the door to soak in a hot tub and heard the door click behind me and realized I was naked, had no key, no cellphone, and I got a sheet of blue plastic off the woodpile and wrapped it around me and walked barefoot down a gravel road hoping to find friendship from strangers. It took awhile.
That day I found out what Okay means: it means having shoes on and not having to ring doorbells while half-naked in winter to ask a stranger to please phone the rental agency to send someone with a key. For thy sweet love remembered is to me fantastic and I forget I’m naked in this piece of plastic.
Dear Friends,
I truly believe The Show Must Go On but I had to back out of some this week because I took a bad fall and wrecked my left knee and Brian the orthopedic guy said, "No way." But I look forward to seeing you in June.
Garrison
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I wish your knee a speedy recovery. Thank you for reminding us of the beauty of poetry. I've just read that Dropbox is laying off 500 employees in part because of the rise of AI, which apparently is even better at generating software code than it is at producing human language. Suddenly computer science may not be such a safe field of study after all. English majors, take heart.
Garrison, you are the funniest man on the planet. I'm glad you got out of chemistry class too. You are a spring chicken compared to me ~ I'm almost 90. I love it that your beloved is a musician and that she takes you to the opera. Opera has been in my DNA since I was 8 years old. Even though I have a my father's name (Talmage) I am a girl or old lady. You will love this. When I was in the ordination process for the Episcopal Church I was asked by the COM what my passion was. I blurted out: "OPERA" and then slapped my hand across my mouth thinking, Oh my God I was supposed to say Jesus or God ~ I've cooked my goose. Luck was with me or God was with me for a priest on the commission happened to love opera too so by gum they ordained me. Heal fast. I have 2 new knees and a new hip plus titanium in my back. Many call me Titanium Tally. Take care of yourself.