O Lucky Man
The Luckiest Man in the World
I used to have a grandma who said, often, while I was cradled on her ample lap, “You must think I’m terrible.”
I did.
For a very long time I thought she was terrible. She was mean to my saintly Grandpa, she did not disguise her distaste for my father, and she was in many ways the bane of my mother’s existence, fretful, complaining, always unhappy about no longer being in Ohio. She refused medical treatment for an eye that could have been treated but finally exploded, leaving her more than half blind. She outlived Grandpa and made herself unwelcome in her daughter’s house by repeatedly banging her bedroom floor with the cane she used for the arthritis her doctors later said she never had. She was consigned to a nursing home at some point, and I did not visit her, because the one time I did they had left her sprawled fat and half naked on a bed, barely conscious and totally ignored. It’s damaging to a young man to see his grandmother’s genitals posed for his eyes as if by a serial killer. I never went back.
But now, long after her death in her mid-nineties, I’m actually starting to understand her, if not like her. You don’t have to throw a stone very far to find people who think I’m terrible. I am, of course. My wife tells me every day, sometimes two or three times, that I am intolerable, intolerant, and impossible. Like Grandma, I find it increasingly difficult to walk. I am querulous, quick-tempered, mercurial, and also whimsical, lecturing, and, I’m sure, frighteningly solitary. I have become, in many ways, my Grandma.
But there’s an underlying truth I am obliged to recognize and confess. I am the luckiest man in the world. I am a writer. Always was, from the first moment — even before — I could read. And writers wind up, very very often, in a state of war with humanity. We spend our lives observing people, and then we decide against the native goodness of Mankind. I struggled for decades, with the explicit aim of NOT becoming Mark Twain at Hadleyburg or Leonardo Da Vinci, catatonic in his final years because there was no one left to talk to. I got there anyway.
Grandma was no writer. She got there though, where Twain and da Vinci did, and I did too. But what a hell of a journey I have had getting here, and I am not sorry about how it ends, because I spent so many decades believing in all the good things that are now so hard to let go. I did believe almost all the way, and I treasure every moment of beauty and joy and sacrament and miraculous blessings that paced my journey. Hardly anyone ever gets what I have received over the years. The gift of talent, time, vision, privacy, and love.
There will be more here. It’s a long piece actually. I love the life I have lived, and I intend to keep talking about it.
[More to Come]
I used to have a grandma who said, often, while I was cradled on her ample lap, “You must think I’m terrible.”
I did.
For a very long time I thought she was terrible. She was mean to my saintly Grandpa, she did not disguise her distaste for my father, and she was in many ways the bane of my mother’s existence, fretful, complaining, always unhappy about no longer being in Ohio. She refused medical treatment for an eye that could have been treated but finally exploded, leaving her more than half blind. She outlived Grandpa and made herself unwelcome in her daughter’s house by repeatedly banging her bedroom floor with the cane she used for the arthritis her doctors later said she never had. She was consigned to a nursing home at some point, and I did not visit her, because the one time I did they had left her sprawled fat and half naked on a bed, barely conscious and totally ignored. It’s damaging to a young man to see his grandmother’s genitals posed for his eyes as if by a serial killer. I never went back.
But now, long after her death in her mid-nineties, I’m actually starting to understand her, if not like her. You don’t have to throw a stone very far to find people who think I’m terrible. I am, of course. My wife tells me every day, sometimes two or three times, that I am intolerable, intolerant, and impossible. Like Grandma, I find it increasingly difficult to walk. I am querulous, quick-tempered, mercurial, and also whimsical, lecturing, and, I’m sure, frighteningly solitary. I have become, in many ways, my Grandma.
But there’s an underlying truth I am obliged to recognize and confess. I am the luckiest man in the world. I am a writer. Always was, from the first moment — even before — I could read. And writers wind up, very very often, in a state of war with humanity. We spend our lives observing people, and then we decide against the native goodness of Mankind. I struggled for decades, with the explicit aim of NOT becoming Mark Twain at Hadleyburg or Leonardo Da Vinci, catatonic in his final years because there was no one left to talk to. I got there anyway.
Grandma was no writer. She got there though, where Twain and da Vinci did, and I did too. But what a hell of a journey I have had getting here, and I am not sorry about how it ends, because I spent so many decades believing in all the good things that are now so hard to let go. I did believe almost all the way, and I treasure every moment of beauty and joy and sacrament and miraculous blessings that paced my journey. Hardly anyone ever gets what I have received over the years. The gift of talent, time, vision, privacy, and love.
There will be more here. It’s a long piece actually. I love the life I have lived, and I intend to keep talking about it.
[More to Come]
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