Lumps and Dirt

Today, while Jeff endured the usual poking and prodding as a guinea pig in the Merck vaccine trial at Georgetown U., I read AARP Magazine.

This is not anywhere near the dreary pastime it sounds like. Apart from a long-running subscription to Reader’s Digest (which I’m finally inclined to let lapse,) I don’t seek out magazines. But, the monthly AARP one comes with a membership and is almost invariably worth a look.

I have never read Rabbit, Run, or The Widows (or Witches) of Eastwick, or anything else by John Updike for that matter, but I surely appreciated his essay in the Nov-Dec AARP, “The Writer in Winter.” Now, in addition to the fact that I have not read the above-mentioned Updike works, I have also not written anything of consequence, so I must allow that it’s a leap of vanity, or at least presumptuousness, to claim that I can relate in any way to his words, but I can.

Particularly these ones (in which he laments that his greatest rival may be his younger, nimbler self):

...the same brain gropes through its diminishing neurons for images and narratives that will lift lumps out of the earth and put them under the glass case of published print...

...[a writer] should have in hand a provocative beginning and an ending that will feel inevitable. Instead, he may arrive at his ending nonplused...The threads have failed to knit. The leap of faith with which every narrative begins has landed him not on a far safe shore but in the middle of the drink...

Anyway, I loved the imagery. Whether or not I still have a full complement of neurons, undiminished, I can viscerally feel that sense of groping for anything that might turn lumps of earth to publishable display pieces. Threads do fail to knit. Nowadays they fail even to turn from fuzz to threads. Ok...so we’re still waiting for those fibers, and there may be no brain left to knit them, should they form.

So anyway, perhaps I should stick to journaling for now, as recommended by another article in the same AARP issue, this one entitled “Find Purpose, Live Longer.” The author is Gregory Plotnikoff, M.D., medical director for Abbott Northwestern’s Institute for Health and Healing in Minneapolis. Especially effective, says he, after “a major life change that leaves you feeling lost [such as] when a spouse dies, you retire, or your kids leave home, [i.e.] you interrupt your personal story.” Hmmm. The task, so he says, is to “figure out how this episode fits into the plot of your life.”

Well, geesh. I thought I had given up on plot. But let’s suppose I can take a giant step sideways and revisit that discarded assumption. It might be a better choice than eating too much chocolate and revisiting chocolate headaches. (I am bound and determined to have one tomorrow.)

Actually, there are several things I need to revisit tomorrow which are a good deal more solid than assumptions, including A.A. Medical to see how the dad’s doing, AACC to get the Gabe registered for Japanese, and Whole Foods to restock the supplement drawer. If I encounter any promising lumps of dirt in the meantime, t’will be a bonus.