Manifesto: Bad Ass Old

     I’m old.  If you’re fifty or under, I’m old, right? If you’re fifty-nine, maybe I’m still old because this summer I turned sixty and we all know that “old” depends on, well, on how “old” you are right now.  If you’re forty, sixty is old.  If you’re seventy, sixty is most likely young.  If you’re eighty, sixty is definitely young.  In any case, at sixty, I am getting on the older side of things no matter how I spin it. 

    I am aging.  My skin is looser than it was a year ago, a lot looser than it was ten years ago.  I have little jowls now, just on either side of my chin.  My hair is not totally, but mostly, gray and I still dye it blond. I try to keep it a tasteful, neutral blond.  Decades ago, I could decide to “get in shape” and in just two weeks of walking, hiking, bike-riding or whatever, my body would noticeably, easily, tone up, tighten, and strengthen.  I was told I was “naturally athletic.”  I wasn’t, however, an athlete, so over the years, my ability to get in shape has dissipated to the point where now it is hard work.  In fact, I can’t say I am in shape or have gotten in shape since maybe about age forty-two.  I got hurt around then – a skiing injury to my knee that came with myriad complications and two years of repeated surgeries. I never quite recovered, or got back in shape, after that.

    Last spring, I started out – not just to get in shape – but to ride a bike because I’ve always loved riding a bike – and was only able to ride five miles before I had to stop.  However, by the end of the summer, I was up to a thirty-five mile bike ride on a twice weekly basis.  Unfortunately, the weather got cold and unpleasant here in Denver and I had to stop my biweekly bike rides.  After that, I only managed thirty minutes on the elliptical a couple times a week, if I was on task, over the winter season.

     When this past spring and summer rolled around, I got back on the bike, but didn’t quite manage to get up to speed.  I was doing twelve to fifteen miles rides once a week at best.  But I was writing every day. At least a thousand words, or one scene a day, whichever came first, for two months of the summer.  So, even if I didn’t achieve my fitness goals, I did finish the rough draft of the memoir I’ve been writing this past year and a half.  Trade-offs.  It’s all about the trade-offs. 

    I started this essay off by saying I am old. What is that about? Thoughts of  aging bring me back to the year I was six - six years old.  At age six, I knew my life’s calling.  I had decided I would be an author when I grew up.  I pronounced it arthor. I’m going to be an arthor.  I plagiarized Goldilocks and the Three Bears early on.  By third grade, the bell rang and I refused to leave my desk, thick into an eleven page story about a dancing groundhog, my face screwed tight in concentration, pencil moving, leaving delicious marks across the page.  At ten, I ambitiously tackled the novel and wrote a book, entitled “Top Secret 28890” with illustrations by my best friend, then Kevin Chappell, also a fifth grader.  In ninth grade, I wrote about an American soldier in Vietnam and won the high school short story writing competition. 

     At sixteen, I got pregnant.  The stories stopped.  The future I faced, in spite of my passion for writing, had not included the life of the mind.  Raised in a cult-like religious sect, I knew what lay ahead: marry a Godly boy, serve the Lord, and raise children to do the same.  The only other option?  My mother thought I might decide to “go in the work.”  In the vernacular of the sect, that meant becoming a preacher of the gospel.  If I chose, I could put aside a worldly life all together, forsake all, and go out to spread the gospel news from out of a suitcase, accompanied by another preacher, or “worker.”   

      I sampled whiskey at age 14 and discovered my first great release as a child of strict fundamentalist Christians.  That whiskey signaled the beginning of a circuitous route into adulthood – away from the Godly boy I might marry or “servant of the Lord” trajectory and head first into the wicked world I’d been warned against.  I became a wild girl and by age nineteen had two daughters I would raise alone.  My children and I spent the next twenty plus years in poverty.

   I didn’t do too badly for a high school dropout.  Just as affirmative action was passed, I got a job as one of the first female disc jockeys of the era for a radio station and began a career in radio broadcasting that lasted until my early thirties and sobriety.  Still, my radio broadcasting career never paid enough to lift us out of poverty.  The girls slept on the floor in radio stations where I worked overnights.  Food stamps supplemented my meager paycheck.

     When I got sober at age thirty, I decided to go back to school and get an education.  I became a high school English teacher, which paid a little better than what I brought in as a disc jockey. But it only took about six years for me to realize that, though I loved teaching and high school aged youth, public institutions were anathema to my creative temperament, so I moved on to graduate school.  I was still focused on getting out of poverty and so, rather than an MFA, I chose to get an MSW, ultimately becoming a licensed psychotherapist.

     What happened to the dream, my calling as a writer? It never went away.  I wrote.  I wrote all those years, one way or another, in journals, notebooks, scraps of paper, on the typewriter, and word processor.  I wrote through the years of poverty.  Stories, essays, poetry.  Every once in a while I got brave and sent a story, a poem, or an essay out.  Not very often.

       I didn’t know how to write yet.  I had talent, a flair for words, but I had absolutely little, to no, instruction in the craft of writing.  What little craft I gained, came when I went to college at last, age thirty four, my kids almost grown.  I had to turn in research papers and write essays to meet the requirements for a bachelor’s degree in English and secondary education.  In college, I learned about sentence structure, grammar, and writing conventions, but very little about creative writing. Still, I kept writing. 

    I passed my forties struggling to make that final leap into financial security. By my fifties, and in a late marriage that improved my financial situation, at least compared to the living I was used to scratching by, I had the means to attend writer’s conferences for the first time.  My real education in the writing craft commenced. 

     Now, at sixty, my writing career has just begun. Just begun.  It took an entire decade of workshop attendance and writing conferences to get me to the point that last year, at fifty-nine, I took myself seriously as a writer for the first time and committed to a writing practice.  I became a member at the Lighthouse, a writing community I am incredibly fortunate to have access to where I live in Denver, Colorado.  I began taking classes at Lighthouse and was invited to participate in the inaugural launch of its Book Project, where, over the past year, I worked on my writing project, a memoir.  I just finished a rough draft.  Revision begins in earnest. 

    I am just beginning.  How do I reconcile the knowledge of writing as my true calling, which came to me at age six, with the fact that I am just beginning to answer that call at sixty?  I don’t.  A friend and mentor of mine says that all the years preceding this one were preparation for my writing career, just now begun.  Further, he says, imagine if you went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, or Harvard, or Barnard, or some such as a young woman, imagine you didn’t have the incredibly deep and rich history, the life experience you carry, the depth and breadth of material that you have at your fingertips now, but instead started out in your twenties in a basically different life than the one you have lived? 

     I nod and agree that he’s right, but I have longed coveted that different life.  I still fantasize a literary family, an Ivy-league education of the best and elite kind behind me.  In truth, it is what I began to imagine at six, from the time I first held a deck of cards, the Author Card Game an aunt gave me one year, featuring Emily Dickenson, Mark Twain, Daniel Hawthorne, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, and others, in my hands.  I caressed those cards, whispered the names of authors and their books to myself, running my fingertips over their faces, the smoothness of the cards that felt so much like a promise in my hands.  I want to be an Arthur, I decided.  Like Emily Dickenson, Virginia Woolf, Emily and Charlotte Bronte. Unimaginable lives called to me from the pages of the books I read, books that represented food to me.  I was so hungry.

     I imagined the lives I only knew of through books as I held the thick chubby pencil I was first given in kindergarten, furiously scribbling, words spilling out of me faster than the fat pencil could go, onto the newsprint quality paper with its penmanship guides to help children form their letters.

       Inside the worlds of the books I read through my childhood, I glimpsed opulent libraries full of treasures, their colorful bindings, and gilt edges.  In my imagination, I sat in cafes conversing with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Rilke, Camus, and so many others.  In my dreams, these authors’ lives were mine. But I did not know how to get there.  I did not know how to find entrance to such libraries, how I might make acquaintance and then friendship with such folk:  writers, artists I longed to join. They were my people; I knew this, even if I could not find the doorway to their world, how to enter, except through the books they wrote.

    And now I am sixty. I have my own library and it is full and rich. I belong to a community of writers I am growing to know, with whom I exchange work, ideas, and the craft.  My writing is not a hobby I came to in my old age, not something I picked up to entertain myself in my doddering years.  It is not some vanity I have of passing on wisdom to heirs and descendants, some legacy I must pass on about who I am or where our family came from. I am not filling my time, or the hours of the day, or looking to meet other retirees as I approach official senior citizen status.  I am not pursuing a hobby in my twilight years.  I am doing none of those things.

   I am sixty, and my writing is my blood.  It is my heart thumping in my chest.  It is every breath I take.  Each morning I awake, I can barely contain it. It is hard work. The hardest I’ve undertaken.  I raised two girls to adulthood.  I’ve had a number one rated radio show in a major market. I’ve gone back to school in my thirties and obtained a teaching degree. I’ve jumped through all the hoops it takes, including graduate school and clinical training, to become a licensed psychotherapist.

      I have decided that I am going to approach my writing as though I would, and have, any thirty year career.  If I live, I will be ninety in thirty years.  I may consider retirement then.  Perhaps.  But until then?  I am writing. This is my job.

      I have few publishing credits, scattered here and there, but I am confident more will come, even many.  There is nothing in life that I have consciously set out to do, professionally, that I have not achieved.  In hindsight, I wish I had set out to write from the very beginning, that I had known then what I know now.  But of course I couldn’t. 

     My call to write was a spark caught deep inside a tender heart, sheltered from the storms of survival.  It took every experience, every moment I’ve lived in order to make its way to the surface, to finally burn hot enough that I have no choice left but to sit down, put my hands on the keyboard, and begin.  What happens to a dream deferred? Langston Hughes’ narrator wonders, in that famous poem.

    In my case, it explodes. Now that my dream is no longer deferred?  I am here, in that opulent library of my mind, full of all the books, the essays, the stories, the poetry I will write, am writing, sipping (wine or absinthe for my companions, coffee or tea for me) conversing in cafes with other writers, authors.   I’m not leaving.  They will have to carry me out feet first, as they did one of my writer friends not so long ago.  James was sixty-two and he died of a massive heart attack, his manuscript unfinished. 

    But you know what? Death happens.  It happens at any age. I’m sixty. What I’m going to do?  I’m going to write a minimum amount every day.  I’m going to submit daily. Publication will come and I want it, but it is not my purpose.  My purpose is to write, damn it.

    I’m going to die with the laptop on, my hands on the keyboard, spilling words on the page.  Like James did. I’m going to die writing.