Old is a good age

 

Andrew Wyeth         Henriette    1967

I very much like this post by Garrison Keillor on Facebook the other day:

Old is a good age    by Garrison Keillor

Old is a good age. Most of your authorities have died off, the uncles who looked at you and shook their heads, your parents who had catalogued your fears and inabilities, the university professors who towered over you, the old bosses, and you’re free of their opinion. Death cleared the decks. Your own narcissism is mostly burned away, and you have a clearer sense of time. Not much left, so why waste it? The 80s can be rough and the 90s are no picnic. So enjoy your ice cream before it melts.

What I want to do is write. The writers who I was intimidated by are dead so the coast is clear. I feel more productive than ever, thanks to the pandemic. If the big publishers don’t want me, no problem. There are online platforms where a working writer can publish his work. I finished a novel, BOOM YEAR, yesterday and if I wanted, I could put it up for readers to download onto Kindle tomorrow. I’ve started on the next novel, the one with the 400-word first sentence. I have an afterlife novel in mind, first sentence of four words: I died on Tuesday. I want to write a book for some single-digit kids I know who are crazy readers. I want to write two columns a week.

The other beauty of being old is that you don’t care if you have five-thousand readers or fifty-thousand or whatever, just as it doesn’t matter if you have ten friends or a thousand. So why wait until fall for a New York publisher to put out the novel you’ve finished in February. And the publishing world is run by New York progressives who are all about diversity, which means that the author’s facial appearance is of crucial importance. Who needs it?

.

( even if it's only Wednesday)