Starting With Stoppard

Tom Stoppard died in November 2025.  From his first success in the late 1960s--Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead-- to now, I followed his career and his work longer and more consistently than I have of any other playwright. (One bit of evidence: most of my copies of his plays are first edition paperbacks.) 

So beginning in December I have embarked on a reading (and viewing) project, exploring his life, thoughts and work.  I did something similar starting at the end of 2024 when I learned of the death of the writer known as K.C. Constantine--too obscure to make the Notable Deaths lists but known to me and self-selected enthusiasts for his unique police procedurals, which happened to be situated in a somewhat fictional version of my hometown of Greensburg, PA.  This resulted in two essays posted on my books blog.

This time I'm likely to spread this project over more time, and it involves not only reading plays but seeing as many as I can that have been filmed (for example, the BBC version of Every Good Boy Deserves Favor) or were originally TV plays (for example, Professional Foul), and seeing as well as reading appropriate interviews.  My procedure so far has been to start re-reading Hermione Lee's fine biography of Stoppard, and stopping at the points where a play is discussed, to read that play first.

Already I've had the luxury of simply dipping into my own library for some associated material.  For example, when Lee mentions Kenneth Tynan's profile of Stoppard for the New Yorker, I pulled down my copy of one of three Tynan profile collections, including the one with Stoppard in it, called Show People.  When Lee writes about Stoppard meeting Vaclev Havel, the playwright and essayist who would eventually become the president of the Czech Republic, I found the Havel essays she refers to in my copy of his collection  Living In Truth.

From the first I knew Tom Stoppard was a writer after my own heart. I was in college then, and experiencing real theatre for the first time.  I came to admire other dramatists of my time (Arthur Miller for example was still alive and writing) but I always suspected that if I had become a successful playwright, my work would be most in sympathy with the work of Tom Stoppard. 

I felt a certain stream in common in those first plays: the word play, the ongoing comic exploration of language philosophy so prominent at Cambridge and Oxford, and its relationship with the satire of the 60s--Beyond the Fringe, That Was The Week That Was, the Goon Show and Peter Sellers, Richard Lester and the Beatles, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and later Monty Python and Douglas Adams.  These were exciting me and my writing in the 60s as well, but I knew them only from their artifacts.  Tom Stoppard knew many of the people involved--he even wrote for a magazine run by Peter Cook. (Of course they all had further roots in English Music Hall (or American vaudeville), the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy (and the appropriate British double acts.)  These influences show up in Stoppard's work as well.)

 Even the collision of Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett in R&G Are Dead was also familiar--in a way, that describes much of my college experience. 

Later plays continued the elegance of language, the high and low humor, the unapologetic focus on ideas in philosophy, science, literature and history, with increasing inventiveness if in quieter ways. And it wasn't all fun and games--for instance, he returned several times, from an early play to one of his last, to the question of what is the nature of the good.

Especially in those early years, what I was reading or had read showed up in his work, along with less familiar stuff, like Lenin's writings.  We seemed to have similar literary tastes.  That we may not have agreed on political questions in the Reagan/Thatcher era, and we might not agree on some larger subjects, not only didn't bother me, it didn't occur to me.  These were beside the point.  (Besides, the whole left/right thing was more extreme in the UK than the US at the time.) Then by the time his work overtly took sides in favor of free expression in Eastern Europe, we were on the same page.

 From the first also, there were always stories of people and relationships, including love stories, that were sometimes overlooked--even by the playwright.  Plays are a narrative art, Stoppard insisted.

Our lives have been quite different, of course. But that unbeknownst to me, it appears he was also a left-handed and right-eared night owl, with even less digital tech than I have, is now a little eerie.

Over the years I valued Stoppard's musings in and outside his plays, especially as a writer.  Like his very helpful description of the art in writing as controlling the flow of information.  He was a realist with a deep sense of vocation, who said "One's duty is to write as well as you possibly can, and to write whatever it is that you are now in a fit state to write."  That's a kind of classical conception that seems increasingly fragile.

A few years ago as he was giving a tour of his home library to a guest and his film crew, he remarked: "I'm deeply romantic about literature as a devotion."  I identify with that as well, though it also seems a fading feeling in following generations.

Stoppard often insisted that reading his plays was fairly fruitless, not only because the published plays are notorious for having been changed already by the publication date, but because of the nature of them as "description of a future event."  That event is the production, the performance.  It's a complicated subject.  There are playwrights, like Shakespeare and especially Chekov, that provide a full reading experience with their texts alone, which performance sometimes does not match.  A good deal of Stoppard does repay reading, but it's also true a lot can be missed.  Not just the many sight gags (they can be at least imagined) but nuances and even narrative moments that are hard to pick up or to be given their proper weight by reading only.

Unfortunately, I've seen only a few of his plays performed: I did manage to see The Real Thing in its original Broadway production (directed by Mike Nichols), regional theatre productions of The Invention of Love and On the Razzle, as well as college productions of Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound and R&G (and I've seen Stoppard's award-winning movie based on that play several times.) 

But he also has work preserved in the movies: for example, his contributions to the hallucinatory Brazil,  the Spielberg production of Empire of the Sun, and  his voice in the Indiana Jones film with Sean Connery as Indy's father. (Stoppard also wrote the screenplay for John Le Carre's The Russia House, starring Connery.)  Of course he is most famous for his Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love, which despite co-writer credit is mostly his work.

Perhaps his most sustained work for television was the British miniseries based on the related Ford Maddox Ford novels collected under the title Parade's End.  I admire both the script and the novels greatly.

Besides some TV plays and even a few radio plays done early in his career on YouTube, and more available from the BBC,  there's a late radio play on YouTube called Darkside, a remarkably short play that incorporates all of Pink Floyd's classic album, Dark Side of the Moon. (This play also concerns the struggle to define the good.)  For those curious about Stoppard, this is not a bad place to start.

Stoppard wrote outrageous comedies and quieter if equally unusual dramas, often incorporating history and playing with concepts of time.  But all his plays had laughs.  The laugh, he told an actor in one of them, "is the sound of comprehension."  

He loved the process of theatre, working with producers, directors, actors, designers, all through rehearsals in major productions, often rewriting on request. That meant the play was still alive. He wrote for small casts and large ones, in one-acts, and in a trilogy (The Coast of Utopia) that took nearly nine hours to perform. In New York, it was the hottest ticket in town.  What was its sensational subject? Mid-nineteenth century intellectuals of pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia. Each of those plays ran separately and consecutively during the week, but all three were performed back to back on Saturdays.  I was in New York briefly during the run and heard the buzz, but the tickets--especially for Saturdays--were sold out far in advance, even if I could somehow afford to buy one. 

Before I started my chronological exploration this month I watched a lot of interviews from recent years, particularly about his last play, Leopoldstadt, a summary work in more ways than one, reflecting aspects of his own life and its previously unknown context--namely that many older members of his Czech Jewish family died in the Holocaust.  The play follows a similar family from the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s.   Performances left people in tears, including on more than one occasion, Stoppard himself.  He was 83 when it was first staged in London, 85 when it came to New York. In interviews he expressed an eagerness to be writing another play, but also admitted that after this play, it was hard to know where to go after that crowning work.

Stoppard died in November, at the age of 88.  "Death is not anything," Guildenstern says towards the end of R&G. "It's the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back..."  He was by all accounts a very sociable man (his large annual parties were legendary), who (he admitted) felt most comfortable alone.  He was a loving husband and father and friend, known for his kindness--and he owned that the kindness was deliberate, a commitment.  A lot of people are missing him.  He's not coming back.  Throughout his life Stoppard quoted another playwright's line to the effect that the obscure current underlying all of life is grief.

His work lives on, and so in this way he lives for me. Stoppard realized his plays would be produced and read for an indeterminant time after his death, but beyond that he felt such speculation was idle. Who knows what will survive and speak, if anything, especially in the increasingly uncertain future. 

Stoppard was committed to writing for the theatre, which of all writing is most obviously experienced in somebody's present. But his reservations duly noted, the same is true of reading his plays, his words.  The writing that is read is also experienced in the present, whenever (and wherever) that present happens to be.

Stoppard's verbal eloquence wasn't restricted to jokes, ironies and epigrams.  In particular I think of the profound and profoundly moving eloquence that appears at the end of play Shipwrecked, the middle play of his Coast of Utopia trilogy.  To me it is as enduring as any lines of any playwright in my lifetime. 

 Alexander Herzen has just suffered the sudden death of his young son.  Michael Bakunin attempts to comfort his by saying, "Little Kolya, his life cut so short! Who is this Moloch...?"  Herzen replies:

 "No, no, not at all! His life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced?...   Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question." 

Origins: The Winter Solstice

 

The Winter Solstice is considered the most celebrated annual event in the history of human cultures around the world.  Ancient structures survive in many of today's countries that seem designed to funnel the solstice sunlight, from the Great Pyramid and the Karnak temples in Egypt to Stonehenge in England, but also in Turkey, Germany, France, Mexico, Wales, India, Zimbabwe, Peru, Easter Island, Cambodia, Japan, Canada, India, Bulgaria, Sweden, Russia, Brazil and the USA, among others.

Most of the traditions still found in the grab bag of modern Christmas observances come from Winter Solstice rituals, including the evergreen tree, holly, candles, the Yule log (and Yuletide itself) as well as stories of the birth of a divine son, usually in a cave or other dark place. Even the red and white outfit of Santa Claus mimics the red and white ritual garments of various cultures, including far northern cultures (think North Pole) for the Solstice. 

Many surviving indigenous cultures still celebrate the Winter Solstice.  In many indigenous and ancient observances the emphasis was on the light and dark, with attention not only to it being the shortest day of the year but the longest night--and so the stars were important.  It was at the same time the beginning of winter, which--for one thing--was the traditional time of story-telling.  In some tribes, the most important stories, such as the creation, could be told only in the winter season. The stars in the winter night sky could also be important in these stories.

For many, the Winter Solstice was the rebirth of light, and so of birth.  But for others the emphasis was more earthy, and not on birth, but on a kind of pregnancy.  For example, in rituals of the Caney Indians of Central America that I participated in a few times in the past, the central figure was a Mother Earth symbol, becoming pregnant and beginning the gestation of the new life that would appear in the spring, especially the plants growing up from the earth. As the days grow slowly longer, the life that appears in the spring grows slowly, unseen, in the dark earth.  It is a celebration of that promise.

I think of all this when the celebrations this time of year seem increasingly distant from the natural world which first inspired them.  That includes many of the remaining religious expressions, which are largely elements of institutions that, deliberately and not, have distanced themselves from these ties to natural cycles, the mysteries of the planet's life.

But mostly we see this in secular observances. Of course, gifts are always symbols of the heartfelt intent of the giver, regardless of what they are. But when we consider gifts we buy, the term "materialism" is often bandied about.  But it's not precisely materialism.  Commercialism maybe--the commodification of everything, and the emphasis on products and constructions that are largely abstractions, symbols of something--if nothing else, of successful advertising and momentary fashion. The real material, the real physical, is of the Earth.  

The material, the realities of our own planet becomes ever more distant each year, except as imagery manipulated by technologies. What we experience is becoming mostly what we see on those tiny phone screens.

As for the stars in our skies, who can see more than a few, if any at all? Smothered by electric lights, blocked by buildings, the night sky that was mightily present to our ancestors has just about disappeared.  And when I searched for photos of evergreens against a starry sky, most of what Google showed me were very enhanced, and many were already generated by A.I.  (I can't vouch for how altered the image above may be, but it purports to be an actual photo taken by Ryan Hutton in Wisconsin on the Winter Solstice.)

In the end nature won't be denied.  Deep cold, wind, rain, snow in unusual proportions and ferocity, that visit us with increasing frequency as partially the effects of climate distortion, will make themselves felt, if not known.  Stay safe, and remember the original: the Winter Solstice.

Origins: Thanks--and Franks--Giving

[Above: painting of Pueblo Green Corn Ceremony circa 1930 by Opwa Pi (Red Cloud)

The first ceremonial Thanksgivings in North America occurred before history was written on this continent.  Such individual ceremonies were part of daily lives for most if not all Indigenous hunters and gatherers, such as giving thanks to the animal that gave its life to the hunter, or a constant consciousness of sacredness in gathering and crafts like basket-weaving.

It is certain that even in historical times, group ceremonies of thanks in Native tribes included giving thanks for the harvest.  Tribes in the Eastern Woodlands and Southwest in particular celebrated Green Corn Ceremonies or festivals (and many still do.)  

It seems likely that the most famous "first" Thanksgiving in Patuexet (Plymouth), Massachusetts in 1621 (or 1623)  was at least partly inspired by such an event among local Native groups such as the Wampanoags who attended--and reportedly outnumbered the Pilgrim colonists.  Like traditional Green Corn ceremonies, it lasted three days, beginning on June 30.  This cooperative venture was not repeated.  The next harvest was bad, and eventually the Pilgrim fathers slaughtered the same tribal peoples, setting a horrific but often followed precedent.

Other religious ceremonies of thanks to the Christian God had already been held among colonists in Newfoundland (1578), Jamestown, La Florida and a colony in Maine.  The first national day of thanks was declared in 1789 by President George Washington, in gratitude for the Constitution.  It was held that year on November 26.  Other Presidents declared national Thanksgiving days, one year at a time and on various dates, though some Presidents didn't at all. 

Beginning in the first quarter of the 19th century, magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale began a 36 year campaign in favor of an annual and official Thanksgiving Day.  Today's tradition was established by President Abraham Lincoln in October 1863, just weeks before he gave his historic Gettysburg Address. In part he wanted the nation to give thanks but also pray for healing after the Civil War.  He'd already declared a day of thanksgiving for that August, but then made Thanksgiving an annual holiday, to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November. It was only the third annual national holiday to be declared.

But the calendar is a tricky thing: sometimes the last Thursday of the month is the fourth, and sometimes (roughly two time out of seven) it is the fifth Thursday of the month.  It was the fifth Thursday in 1939, and retailers begged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare that year's Thanksgiving for the fourth Thursday, the next-to-last, because they were afraid of a foreshortened Christmas shopping season.  He agreed.

National pandemonium ensued, which only got worse in 1940 when FDR again designated the next-to-last Thursday, which that year was the third.  Republicans in particular derided him, and called it Franksgiving.  Some 16 states declared their own Thanksgiving day to be celebrated on the last Thursday, so there was no longer a national day of thanks.  In 1941, Congress passed a resolution assigning the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving, which FDR signed into law. (Retailers had not shown any appreciable change in sales with the earlier date.) 

 Some states continued to designate the last Thursday, and celebrations were muted during World War II, but by the end of the war, almost all of the nation celebrated on the new Franksgiving of the fourth Thursday. The last holdout was Texas, which did not change its law from the last to the fourth Thursday until 1956. (Then of course there's Canada, which holds its Thanksgiving the second Monday of October.)

Though it is unlikely that the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving included pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes and even today's breeds of turkey, most of the day's food traditions do seem to come from New England.  Recipes for most of the traditional meal are in the first cookbook published in America, in Connecticut in 1796. 

The Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York has been an annual event since 1930.  Coming near the end of the collegiate football season, Thanksgiving has been a tradition for rivalry games. (Hence the Great Turkey Heist at Knox College I participated in, oh long ago.)  The Detroit Lions began scheduling a game on Thanksgiving also in the 1930s. 

It all began with gratitude for nature's sustaining gifts.  But beginning with those first ideologues in New England and Virginia, Americans relationship to nature has been more hostile than grateful. Settlers and their descendants have been busy ruining the land and waters and now even the air for centuries, and we are close to finishing the job. Maybe we can at least acknowledge this with a little grace as we're saying grace, and try to do better.

  The natural world is the source of all life, including our big and dubious brains. The rest of nature would be grateful if we'd start using them wisely. "It is an error to say that we have 'conquered nature,'" FDR said in 1935, in the midst of an ecological crisis called the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression caused largely by wanton exploitation and destruction of land, forests and waters.  "We must, rather, start to shape our lives in a more harmonious relationship with nature."

Lots of other things are associated with family gatherings on Thanksgiving these days.  Those retailers have largely absorbed the holiday, with their extended pre-Christmas sales. Dispersal of families has meant travel has gone far beyond over the river and through the woods, and now involves the added tension of the busiest air travel time of the year. Thanksgiving also begins the holiday season when people measure themselves against a Norman Rockwell ideal, and find there are angry words, sulks, disappointment, bewilderments and tears as well as the occasional radiant smiles and gratitude.

Whether gratitude is part of the mix anymore is perhaps a matter of personal choice.  This year we may be thankful that things are not worse than they are, which may well itself become a Thanksgiving tradition.  

Origins: Peanuts

 Americans for more than a century have known peanuts primarily as a snack food, but it didn't start out that way.  Harvested by indigenous peoples of Peru, Brazil and elsewhere in South America, they arrived in North America well before Columbus.  Eventually they spread to West Africa and to China.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, peanuts in the US were cultivated mostly in the southeastern states such as Virginia and Georgia.  They were known then as goobers, or goober peas--a more accurate name since they are legumes, not nuts. They were probably named goobers by slaves, from the Bantu word nguba. It's possible that peanuts came to the South from West Africa along with the slave trade.  Grown at first as animal feed, they were also fed to slaves, who were literally working for peanuts--though that's probably not the origin of the phrase.

But then came the Civil War, and goobers became an essential food for Confederate soldiers, because they were plentiful and nutritious.  Invading and hungry Union troops found little alternative to them left in the South, but developed a taste for peanuts that they took with them to the North.  Peanut vendors began to appear on city streets.

By the end of the century, peanuts as snack food began an association with two major forms of mass entertainment: the circus (and its cousins such as the carnivals, where "Peanuts, popcorn, candy apples!" became the concessionaire's cry) and baseball.  But the cultural association with black Americans continued, so that at public entertainments the seats in the back reserved for them were called The Peanut Gallery.  That was broadened in vaudeville times to simply mean the cheap seats. The reference to it as a children's section began  in the 1940s,  immortalized in the 1950s for my generation by the Howdy Doody Show on the new mass medium of television. The association may be that children are small and so are peanuts.  But today there is some pejorative association with sniping "from the peanut gallery," as by the vulgar crowd.  The idea that hecklers threw peanuts at the stage may be part of it, or more probably invented later.   

Peanuts at first were sold in the shell.  Cora Bunch, a concessionaire with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show began selling them by the bag, which caught the attention of the fledgling Pennsylvania concern transplanted to Virginia called Planter's Peanuts, where she was hired.  Planter's was started by Italian immigrants, the Peruzzi brothers, who roasted peanuts with a hand-cranked machine for their fruit and nut stand.  Obici Peruzzi tinkered together an automatic peanut roaster, and the brothers were in business.  Their "Mr. Peanut" logo--created when a house artist added a monocle and cane to the sketch by a fourteen year old contest winner--helped sell peanuts as a fun snack.

As for baseball, the story goes that an early baseball entrepreneur sold advertising space on the scorecards given out to patrons, but one of his advertisers, a peanut company, paid him with their product.  He began selling these peanuts at baseball games in 1895.  In 1908, two New York songwriters who had never seen a baseball contest, wrote a song called "Take Me Out To The Ball Game," still sung by the entire stadium of fans during the seventh inning stretch at Major League games.  "Buy me some peanuts and Crackerjacks--I don't care if I ever get back," expresses pure infectious joy.

Later in the 20th century the peanut took on other roles--some say mostly through the efforts of pioneer botanist George Washington Carver, who worried that the South was killing its fertile soil by planting way too much cotton, and only cotton.  He advocated crop rotation, and peanuts was one of the crops he favored.  Carver eventually came up with more than 300 uses for peanuts, including salted peanuts, and two more variations that entered the American food canon: peanut ice cream, and especially peanut butter cookies.  (Peanut butter had been known for a long time--though Carver developed several variations himself.  It had been popularized by John Harvey Kellogg, the cereal king, who patented a process for making a smooth peanut butter for his sanitarium patients.)  

Certainly by the 1950s and probably earlier, salted peanuts became staples at bars selling beer and liquor in England as well as the US, often available in little bowls on the bar, for free. That they might increase thirst of course did not occur to the bar owners.  

For whatever combination of reasons, peanut farmers like James Earl Carter (who became Georgia's Governor and then President of the United States in 1977) elevated peanuts as a crop in Georgia, which leads the nation in its production--so much so that it established a nickname as the Goober State, though officially it preferred to be associated with the peach.

As for peanuts and baseball, that association was still very strong in the early 1960s when I started going to Pittsburgh Pirates games at the venerable Forbes Field.  Most concessions were just outside the ballpark gates, so most food inside came from the roaming vendors.  I would leave the game with a pile of peanut shells on the cement in front of my seat.  Peanuts  were very popular with adults as well, who liked them with beer. They were easier to manage then when the ballpark beer came in bottles and cans, and at my first night games I would hear the frequent sound of them being opened, and see the spray rise into the haze of the lights.  

Now that ballparks are green fields surrounded by food courts, with entire restaurants hidden within the stadium, the lowly peanut wouldn't seem to have much of a chance.  But according to the National Peanut Board, the leading peanut supplier still sells more than four million bags of peanuts to MLB parks each year.   Still, in general the rise of peanut allergies has probably taken its toll.

As for the phrase "working for peanuts," there is no agreed-upon point of origin, though two possibilities are connected to those two traditional venues for peanuts sales and consumption.  By one account, it referred to circus elephants, who worked all day "for peanuts."  By another, it came from an early ballpark peanut vendor who joked with friends that he was working for peanuts.  But whatever the derivation, it likely refers to the fact that peanuts are inexpensive, and if you work for them, you aren't being paid very much.  This suggests that there might be something to the association with slaves in the South. In general, peanuts had a remarkably consistent association with poor people, black or white, with all the attendant contempt. 

The origin of Crackerjacks is more specifically known.  A German immigrant with a popcorn stand in Chicago, F.W. Rueckheim, concocted a variation of the molasses-coated popcorn ball, and added peanuts--then mostly a circus snack.  He premiered his "candied popcorn and peanuts" at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

The Crackerjack name probably came from two slang expressions of the time, "cracker" meaning excellent, and "Jack" as a slang name for any man.  So "that's cracker, Jack" may have led to the combination.

But the Crackerjack logo--prominent on the boxes we got as kids, and almost as famous as Mr. Peanut--has a more definite and melancholy origin. The boy in the sailor suit with his dog was a likeness of Rueckheim's beloved grandson Robert, who died of pneumonia at the age of 8.

On Turning 79 in 2025

Top of Trinidad Head June 30, 2025. My climb dedicated to my friend Mike and to the
memory of Jim Harrison

On one of his birthdays, writer Jim Harrison pointed out that he was exactly one day older than he was the day before. That’s one interesting perspective on a birthday’s significance, and here is another: for the next year after my birthday I will give my age as 79, but in fact that birthday marked the end of my 79^th year of life after birth (or as adherents of some belief systems would say, of this life). The moment after the anniversary of my birth, I will be living in my 80^th year.

So it’s not too early to consider this threshold. For all of my childhood and adolescence, I did not know anyone as old as 80. All but one of my great-grandparents were dead when I was born, and the last great-grandfather died when I was 4, and he was 79. (Though he lived nearby, I don’t believe we ever set eyes on one another.)

My three surviving grandparents and those in their generation I always thought of as old, but they were mostly in their 50s and 60s when I was a child.

My grandmother and me 1972 when she was 76 and I was 26.

My grandmother Severini turned 80 the year I turned 30. She’s my only real experience with that age. I happened to be nearby for most of her 80s, and spent a fair amount of time with her. The family stories she told me (or repeated from earlier years) I used much later in my Severini Saga.

That was my last frequent, sustained contact with anyone in their 80s. I saw my Uncle Carl on visits to PA a few times in his 80s, and was in touch with him by email especially in the last year or two of his life in his early 90s. I was in touch by phone and email with my Uncle Bill in his last year—he was 96.

Most of the conversations with all of them involved them talking about the past. It was fascinating first of all to hear what they remembered and what they didn’t. But the information, the feeling of their time, added depth to my life. It was I think an important and a satisfying experience for both of us.

For our past and what we recall, what we’ve learned from our experiences and observations are reflected in our stories, and our stories are increasingly what we have left to give as we grow older.

But the young (a category that now encompasses almost everybody) have to be ready to receive those stories. I marvel with some chagrin how uninterested I was in my parents’ lives, and then it was too late. It seems we must ourselves have a past we recognize as such, before we become interested in the pasts of others.

My grandmother got through some of my cognitive blindness by being a beguiling storyteller. And I was in a sense a captive audience. She did not hesitate to evoke my guilt and shame to ensure that I visited her often. She arranged endless memorial Masses for my mother so my sisters and I would dutifully attend, and of course go by her house afterward.

I am too distant from the younger generations of my family and too diffident to insist on their attention. I’ve taken on the work of telling my stories, of writing what I remember and what I know, to pass on to younger people by making them available, mostly on the Internet, so they can find them whenever they are ready to receive them. That’s as much purpose as I can find that gives me pleasure enough that I actually do it, however incompletely.

Of course at this age it is more comfortable to spend time with the past than to focus on the future. Apart from the mysteriously timed but inevitable denouement, we face at minimum a gradual decline in health and energy, so our days—and nights—can become at best a less than predictable adventure. So the present demands its attention—bad moments definitely, but with effort, good moments, too.

In these times it is good to have old friends to talk with about the new things happening to us. Besides my very-slightly-younger life partner, I have an even more slightly-younger friend I’ve known since high school. Our phone conversations are becoming paradigms of old people cliches in the greater proportion of time we spend each successive year on comparing health notes. At least we’re not competitive about it (“you think that’s bad, the pain in my...etc.”), the basis of comic bits about old people from at least vaudeville times.

And we are aware of the increasingly strange and threatening context around us, a world that no longer seems to be ours. He and I were partners in high school debating something called “medical care for the aged,” around the time that early Medicare began in 1965. Now not only Medicare and Medicaid are needlessly and cruelly endangered, but the generation-older Social Security. This being only the most specific anxieties, as we are forced to watch a painfully built protective context being angrily dismantled, with cruelty, brutality and contempt for the non-rich as official policy maniacally pursued.

It’s hard also not to notice that this society has blithely accepted (by blithely forgetting or denying them) over a million deaths of mostly older Americans from Covid, which continue with thousands a month. You might get the idea that what old people are expected to do is die, as soon as possible.

Assimilating the past adds depth to the present, but telling our stories from our past can also be a link to the future, and to the young. I usually have a book or two that inform my birthday thoughts. This time it is Horizon by Barry Lopez, which is the summary and final of his many books.

I’ve read several of his earlier books in the past year, including the best known: Arctic Dreams. Though I’ve had some of his books around for years, I did not appreciate until recently that he is one of the best, the greatest writers of my times. (When at the age of 80 Bill Moyers decided to retire from TV, he carefully selected his last interview for his Bill Moyers Journal. It was with Barry Lopez.)

At some point I grazed YouTube for any interviews and events Lopez did that might be preserved there. The first I came upon was at the end of his book tour for Horizon in 2019, and he began his talk with an urgent message. “Hell is coming,” he said. “Not hell with a small h, not something we’re going to solve with technology, or certainly not an election. It’s coming, and we have to figure out how to take care of each other...and provide for our children and grandchildren, so that they have the opportunities to exercise imagination that we have had. Then maybe we have a prayer.”

“If you’re looking for something to do in the time of climate change and ocean acidification and methane gas pouring out of the tundra, and [the Sixth Extinction]: Make common cause with young people.”

They can use the experience that their elders can communicate to help them tell the stories and find greater imagination to apply to addressing what’s coming very soon, he said. They need to imagine not what is pushing us into the future, but what is calling them into the future.

Others reaching my age have grandchildren and perhaps even great-grandchildren with whom they have ongoing personal relationships. I do not. My grandmother in her last years had a mantra: “We do the best we can.” Partly because I didn’t know anyone past 80, and partly because—thanks to the hydrogen bomb, the military industrial complex, the poisoning of the planet and its effects on health, as well as my dubious earning ability—I never expected to reach 79. But I have, in relatively good shape it seems.

So even with what seems like fewer good hours in my day, and more time and attention taken by health matters, an old introvert night owl hermit like me can do what wants to be doing. In my case it’s the same old, same old. I make sentences.

I often post a poem on my birthday.  Here is this year's, by Jim Harrison.

 

The other boot doesn’t drop from heaven.

 I’ve made this path and nobody else

 leading crookedly up through the pasture

 where I’ll never reach the top of Antelope Butte.

 It is here where my mind begins to learn

 my heart’s language on this endless wobbly path,

 veering south and north

 informed by my all-too-vivid dreams

 which are a compass without a needle.

 Today the gods speak in drunk talk

 pulling at a heart too old for this walk,

 a cold windy day kneeling at the mouth

 of the snake den where they killed 800 rattlers.

 Moving higher my thumping chest recites the names of a dozen friends

 who have died in recent years,

 names now incomprehensible as the mountains

 across the river far behind me.

 I’ll always be walking up toward Antelope Butte.

 Perhaps when we die our names are taken

 from us by a divine magnet and are free

 to flutter here and there within the bodies

 of birds. I’ll be a simple crow

 who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.

--Jim Harrison

Very recently, researching the writers who clustered in Key West in the early 1970s for my latest "History of My Reading" post, I watched on You Tube a film made about them.  Jim Harrison was one of them, but he'd died before the film was made.  Towards the end of the film, writer Tom McGuane, his close friend in Key West and elsewhere, read the first part of this poem to the camera.  Then suddenly his voice overlapped with Jim Harrison reading the rest of the poem, filmed evidently for a PBS segment years earlier.  He was standing in front of Antelope Butte in Montana.  

As I looked and listened, I noticed the orange logo on his t-shirt, which looked familiar.  And then I looked down at myself: the orange logo was on the pocket of the dark blue long-sleeved t-shirt I was wearing as I watched, the exact replica of Jim Harrison's.  So this was another reason this poem seemed appropriate for my 79th birthday.

Harrison was 79 in 2016 when he died from a heart attack--instantly, according to his daughter--with pen in hand, while writing a poem.  Not the worst way for a writer to go.  By then he'd known his heart was weakened, as the poem indicates.  Besides becoming a simple crow, he also had wished to be reincarnated as a tree.  

Turning 60 (in 2006)

 This is the first of my birthday posts, back in 2006, just a few years after I started blogging (since blogs didn't exist before.)  It begins a series of  birthday re-posts in chronological order, up to last year's at age 78.  They were originally posted on different blogs, but I wanted to have them all in one place.  And I wanted to see the chronology.  That aspect may also be of interest to others, so I offer this possibility.

  I also assume people about to become 60 and the ages that follow may wish to check their feelings and expectations by reading mine, and they may want to see how those feelings and expectations held up and changed over the years. 

My favorite Magritte, which as a poster has been on a wall of my various residences since the
1970s.  Like many Magrittes, the time depicted could be just before dawn, or just after dusk.
Therefore, it is both.

As I begin writing this, I am 59. When I finish it, I will be 60.

How do I think about turning 60 years old? Some look at how vital we are at this age in comparison to our parents’ generation, and say we’re still young. Or at least in middle-age. You might make a case that these days our youth lasts until 40, and middle age extends to what used to be the retirement age of 65. But as Michael Ventura points out, we’re not living to 120. Sixty isn’t the middle. We aren’t young, in Act I of our lives. We mostly aren’t in Act II anymore.

This is the start of something different. It is early old age---maybe even “young old age” if that feels better. In the theatre of our lives, it’s the curtain coming up on Act III.

This is going to be happening to a lot of people starting about now. When the battleship Missouri was steaming into Tokyo Bay to accept the surrender of Japan, my parents were marching up the aisle of Holy Cross Church in Youngwood, PA. I was born the following June, making me one of the first of the postwar Baby Boomers, and so one of the first Boomers to turn 60. There will be millions more over the next decade.

Turning 60 is a hard thing to admit, even to ourselves. There is a shame attached to it in today’s world. Younger people and even our contemporaries look at us in a different way, and treat us differently. Of course, this happens anyway, whether we admit it or not, and whether or not we announce our identity in this way. Do we say we are 60? Claim the senior discount? It’s scary, maybe even depressing and demeaning.

Part of the scariness is obviously that getting older inevitably places us closer to death. More people we know or know of, people we grew up knowing or knowing about, are suddenly dead. We shudder when this includes our contemporaries, or even those slightly younger. It is hard to accept that we have fewer days ahead than behind. Maybe it’s even harmful to accept it?

Like anything important, both sides of the contradiction are true in some way, and must be embraced, reconciled. There is pain in coming to terms with Act III. But there is also freedom, and purpose.

Michael Ventura

Emphasis is a way of considering one side, before considering the other. Two texts have been important to me in the past few years in this intermittent but intense effort to figure out how to proceed. The first is an essay published in a fairly obscure journal by Michael Ventura, a columnist, essayist and novelist who was approaching 60 when he wrote it in late 2004. The second is James Hillman’s book, The Force of Character, first published in 1999. It so happens that Hillman and Ventura collaborated on an earlier book (We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychoanalysis and the World is Still a Mess.) So though they differ on some points, it seems to me they agree on most basic ideas. It’s mostly a difference of emphasis.

In his essay, Ventura emphasizes loss. This is natural for one approaching 60, and a necessary initiation. When I stumbled onto this essay (in a magazine I’d never seen before, called Psychotherapy Networker) I was jolted. It took me awhile to accept its premises. But in my own 59th year, I came to embrace it, guided by my own life to the truth of Ventura’s words.

The article is called “Across the Great Divide: Middle Age in the Rear-View Mirror.” It begins when Ventura realizes he must make a major change in his life. He can no longer afford to live as he had been in Los Angeles. He must find a new place to live. At the same time, he’s thinking about turning 60, and arranges to meet an old friend in Las Vegas. He drives there, taking a long and thoughtful route.

The statement that rocked me was simple: “When you’re pushing 60, the rest of your life is about saying goodbye.

“Your greatest work may yet be demanded of you (though odds are against that). You may find more true love, meet new good friends, and there’s always beauty (if you have an eye for it) and fun (if you haven the spirit)---still, no matter what, slowly, you must say goodbye, a little bit every day, to everything.”

Ventura’s examples are painfully familiar: you’re saying goodbye to your own face as it was in your youth; to how you drove a car (he mentions reflexes; I’ve noticed night-vision—my eyes don’t readjust from glare as fast as they did), to life without aches and pains, perhaps to certain strengths, and to access to your memory. “Alzheimer’s? ‘A senior moment’? You get used to it and hope for the best. Ain’t nobody can do a thing about it anyway. Goodbye.”

Yes, I know there’s advice out there on strengthening mental agility, and we can all be heartened by the research showing that brain cells continue to be born as well as die all our lives. But the basic point is sound.

Ventura is also saying goodbye to where he’d lived in the prime of his life. Though he isn’t saying goodbye to his career exactly—he writes a column these days for the Austin Chronicle--there is a sense that in some ways he’s doing that, too. Many of us at 60 are facing such a change. For those of us in a position to “retire” (leave our jobs and collect retirement benefits) it is also a time of taking stock of accomplishments, and saying goodbye to having any more, at least in that job. Financial retrenchment has its own set of goodbyes. In many ways, these all imply saying goodbye to possibilities, and perhaps to dreams unfulfilled.

To accept this element of turning 60, I had to come to terms with my 50s. In some ways, my 50th birthday was the best of my life. I’d been living in Pittsburgh but was preparing to leave for California with my partner, Margaret. After years of cobbling together part-time teaching and writing jobs, she’d landed a good full-time position teaching dramatic writing at Humboldt State University. I was attracted to what I learned about the place—an academic environment, in the redwoods, near the ocean, with a temperate climate year round (the increasingly hot Pittsburgh summers were making me edgy), close to indigenous Native American tribal areas, and not far from real wilderness. Yet not terribly far from San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver, three of my favorite cities in North America.

I would be giving up my Pittsburgh life—the infrastructure that worked for me, the city and neighborhood I was fond of, and especially my apartment, the best place I had ever lived. It was a commitment to our relationship, but of course I had to think about my own life and livelihood. My local career in Pittsburgh had stalled, and I felt I could grow into a new one in California, but mostly I felt poised to come into my own on a larger stage. I felt strong and at the top of my writing game, yet with knowledge and experience I hadn’t had when my first book was published in my 30s---especially the hard-won experience of my 40s. My fifties, I felt, would be the fulfillment, the justification of everything in the past. They would also set the pattern for my future, for my culminating accomplishments and at last my proper place in the world, with access to the means to be creative and productive. My fifties would be my redemption. It seemed worth the risk.

For my family birthday, my sisters surprised me with a more personal and elaborate celebration than I expected. They assembled photographs from my childhood. And their gift was unique: an assemblage of objects under a glass dome that represented my life, in the form of a room. There was a desk and bookshelves, a computer, a guitar case on the floor, running shoes and a baseball glove, etc. But the detail was amazing and personal: for example, the tiny books included facsimiles of my book and a few others I treasured.

There was a sense of elegy to this, and of honoring, which was moving. Yet I was looking towards the future. I didn’t see anything ending, really. If I were successful, I could come back anytime.

The move to California was much more wrenching than I had ever imagined. Though I reveled in the soft air, cool until heated by sunlight, I mourned the loss of my apartment and what I had to leave behind. I also quickly discovered that while Margaret had a place in this world because of her job, I had none. The downside of the isolation became apparent. Nobody was much interested in me, as a writer or as anything else.

In some ways I was lucky in early encounters. I worked on writing a video concerning local forest issues, and worked for awhile with a Native American organization. I learned a lot from both, but neither led to anything lasting. And that became one of the characteristics of my 50s: a lot of beginnings that led nowhere.

By some measures, I was enormously productive. I researched, wrote proposals and wrote drafts of chapters on several nonfiction projects, often returning to some aspect of the one I’d been working on when I left Pittsburgh. I wrote fiction. I wrote plays, including a musical for junior high students about smoking, which included the songs: music and lyrics. I wrote and rewrote a screenplay, I wrote and rewrote a young adult novel. I used a new electronic keyboard, a 4-track tape recorder and a computer program to arrange and record songs I’d written.

I sent things out to agents, publishers, theatres, etc. I had conversations and correspondences with several agents and editors on various projects. Nothing came of any of it. The projects closest to my heart got the least response.

I got into grantwriting and picked up freelance jobs writing and editing reports, to generate income. I was already saying goodbye to writing on certain subjects (like popular music) and for some publications (I was no longer in, or in touch with, their younger demographic). But I continued to be published—in one year, my work appeared in five separate sections of the San Francisco Chronicle: the book review, Insight section, the daily and Sunday arts section and the Sunday magazine. Several of these pieces could well have led to books. None of them did. None of them led anywhere.

Thanks to digital technology, I did finally get my one book into paperback—when I did it myself. As that book’s author, I was filmed for three separate television documentaries, any one of which might have led to enough interest that I could get a contract for a new book (or so I thought.) But I never found out. Though I’d been interviewed in films before, and was very successful as a public speaker, none of my footage was used in any of these new projects.

Suddenly my fifties were three-fourths gone. I was applying for full time positions here and in the Bay Area and elsewhere for which I thought I was well-qualified. I got a few interviews, nothing more, and usually a lot less. Still, I kept trying and some cause for hope would turn up. In 2004 I got an assignment from the New York Times to write on a subject I wanted very much to write on, that was central to the book project I’d been vainly trying to put together since before I left Pittsburgh. It was a dream, and worked out very well. Everyone loved the resulting article—my editors and the people I wrote about.

But it led pretty much nowhere, not even to another assignment. I was told that the Times wasn’t taking freelance work for the arts section for awhile, and neither was the San Francisco Chronicle. My financial situation was getting desperate. There were no resources for reasonably frequent travel home, or to the wilderness, or anywhere.

For all this time I had gambled on the next step---the book contract, the book or movie sale, even a play production. Then on the good job that would set things right. Redemption.

But then, as I approached 60, I began to say goodbye to all that. In part it was now simply a matter of looking at time. I sacrificed a great deal to remain true to my dreams, even if that sacrifice wasn’t always intentional. I had already said goodbye to the possibility of having a family. That time had passed me by. Now I was saying goodbye to aspects of my dreams that would never come true, not in the time left to me. I’m not going to have a career as a novelist, a playwright, a screenwriter, an author with a flow of books. It could happen that I’ll have again what I’ve tasted before, like the speaking engagements I had as a book author, or the buzz of seeing my play performed even on an obscure stage. But it won’t be a career.

A career is about movement; movement with its oscillations but generally up and outward. It is about an identity and a livelihood created and recreated in the process. Over time. But much of that time is over.

This is sad of course, because it’s a kind of failure. But at this point, like a lot of failures or changes that come with age, it is also a relief. It is also liberating. I no longer have to look at anything I do as leading to anything else. Everything is what it is.

I don’t discount the possibility of more accomplishment, even of some kind of redemption in the eyes of others. But I’m saying goodbye to the need for it. Success and failure, what do they mean at this point? In comparison to other aspects of growing old, or to the vagaries of existence that take more control, not very much. They may cause me pain, but pain is now a regular part of life. There are famous people with great financial resources who wind up with incurable diseases. There are people with great health insurance who die as a result of bad medical practice. Having money increases your odds of having a comfortable and productive life, but it doesn’t guarantee it.

Like a lot of young writers, I used to sweat over the passing time, mapping out the years against the number of books I could write and publish, the necessary steps to the destiny I craved. Now those calculations show there isn’t enough time left. That anxiety is over. Nothing leads to anything else. But that also means that I can devote my full attention to whatever it is I manage to do in the present. That becomes its own reward. Nothing leads to nothing.

I know that few people get hired for good jobs at my age until they are already established in the higher ranks of that occupation. You either get a job as a CEO, a college president, or something much less. Maybe not only a greeter at Wal-Mart, but not a job that somebody considers part of a career. And there are occupations in fields of my interest where nobody over 50 is even seriously considered. So nothing I do is going to necessarily lead to anything like that.

Right now I have three small jobs that don’t add up to either the income or the demands of a full-time job. They require some diligence, creativity and applications of skills, but their challenges are modest, as are their results. Yet they all have their modest pleasures. So here I am. Say goodbye to redemption. Say goodbye to great expectations. Say goodbye to all that. The intense humiliation of my 50s has led to modesty. It has led back to the moment.

Windsurfer at nearby Clam Beach.  BK photo

I think I did some good work in the past decade, including published work I can be proud of. I may remain puzzled and sad about the work that didn’t go anywhere, that was ignored or scorned, and I have to deal with the work that was never completed, that may never have a completed form, let alone a life outside the rooms of their making. But as long as I have memory, I’ll remember the excitement and experience of making them, or the struggle and yearning and the promise of their potential, however bittersweet those memories may be.

But this modesty, cooling in the release from the crucible of humiliation, is not the whole story. The dearth of time ahead, and the ashes and annihilation at the end of it, are only part of what Act III is about.

Ventura writes about more goodbyes: as older family members die, we say goodbye to family history we don’t know and now will never know, and neither will anyone else. We say goodbye to the last people who knew us as young children.

The common denominator of many goodbyes is death. He even says that the changes in our faces as we age marks the approach of death. “Call it whatever you like, but that’s what it is, that’s what we politely call “aging.” As we lose capabilities forever, we are moving towards the final loss of everything, which is death.

Some of these goodbyes aren’t too difficult to deal with gracefully, once they finally come. The anxiety over the years about losing my hair (which given my maternal grandfather, was all but inevitable) was far more intense and difficult than the acceptance of its reality (at least so far.)

But Ventura points out that the bigger losses are harder to deal with, and require a quality he calls fierceness. “It takes fierceness to grow old well. It takes a fierce devotion to the word goodbye—learning how to say it in many ways—fiercely, yes, but also gently; with laughter, with tears, but, no matter how, to say it every time so that there’s no doubt you mean it.”

This is a kind of tonic to the anxiety we’re bred with in this society to keep up, stay young, and fight off any sign or recognition of death, to the point that people never say their goodbyes at all. The denial of death—the rage against the dying of the light-- may be in some sense noble and courageous, but it can also be just plain denial.

I was present for the last months of my mother’s final illness; I was there at the moment of her death. I helped take care of my father during his last weeks. But I learned most about dying from Tess, our cat, two summers ago. There were no layers of social complication, of her dealing with the emotions of others, with nurses etc. There was just her instinctual confrontation with growing weakness and onrushing death. Some of her behavior was not according to the book. She didn’t hide herself away as cats do, she stayed near us, perhaps responding to our involvement. In the end our companionship was strong.

But some of what the cat books describe was there: the helpless insistent purring, the hovering over the water dish without drinking, and the faraway look in her eyes. Without hesitation, she did what she could of what she used to do. She went outside and surveyed her garden, taking rests. She was in the world as fully as she could be, and yet she was looking far beyond it.

Being aware of the relative nearness of death as well as new aches and pains, failing vision and so on, does focus the goodbyes. Goodbyes are present experiences, though. They include being as fully as possible in the world of now. This moment that will never come again.

Yet in early old age, at the beginning of Act III, and perhaps through it all until the final scene, there is living, and contributing from one’s unique perspective, experiences, talents and character. When we were trying to be successes, we had to emphasize one or two differences, and otherwise be (or pretend to be) the same as everyone else. Now we have no choice. All our differences are on display. They are our character.

Character is the shape of soul. Without the inflation of early ages, we are forced to accept ourselves, good and bad, with consequences pleasant and painful. We are no one’s ideal. “I walk through life oddly,” Hillman writes. “No one else walks as I do, and this is my courage, my dignity, my integrity, my morality, and my ruin.”

There are characteristics that come with becoming an elder. We must take responsibility for the past and we feel the responsibility of the future. In the role of grandparents (actual or metaphorical), we set our sights on the future we will not see.

“Before we leave,” Hillman writes, “we need to uphold our side of the compact of mutual support between human being and the being of the planet, giving back what we have taken, securing its lasting beyond our own.”

James Hillman

In living past the age of procreation, when physical growth is long past and physical pain is a closer companion, we feel differently about our relationship to the world. We no longer feel only one purpose in life—our own preservation, and that of our offspring. And we want to know what it’s all been about. “In later years feelings of altruism and kindness to strangers plays a larger role,” Hillman writes. “Values come under more scrutiny, and qualities such as decency and gratitude become more precious than accuracy and efficiency.”

What we say goodbye to as we age reveals some hellos: hello perhaps to some sharper memories from the distant past. Hello to insights as well as embarrassments. Hello to other worlds. "Discovery and promise do not belong solely to youth;" Hillman insists, "age is not excluded from revelation." Indeed, if the theatre is any guide, Act III is when it's more likely to happen.

Hillman was one of the first since Jung to introduce concepts of soul in psychology. (For Jung, “psyche” and “soul” were virtually identical.) I find the relationship of character, aging and soul most comprehensible, at least intuitively, when I think of soul as not something in the body (as we were taught in Catholic school) but the body as being enclosed in soul.

We do things to do them, we live in the moment and work for the future of what we will leave behind. Character and contribution to the future are the final adventures. "A certain kind of reasonableness is its advocate, and a certain kind of morality adds its blessings," writes Carl Jung. "But to have soul is the whole venture of life..."

Part of what this has meant for me is represented by this site and its companion, the Boomer Hall of Fame, as well as my other ongoing projects (Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily, Soul of Star Trek, Blue Voice etc.) Here at 60’s Now I hope to explore issues pertinent to my generation, our present, past and the future we won’t see.

That’s something else important about Act III-- the character has lived through Acts I and II. We carry our history and the history we’ve experienced, not only in the weight and reference of our words, but in ourselves. I am all that I am, including the heroes of my youth, and those that gave me the imagery of my middle years, and those that inform me now. So that is also why I hope to build a kind of database of those influences from the past in the Boomer Hall of Fame.

I expect all this to happen slowly, fitfully, cumulatively. These aren’t the text-messaging kind of blogs, lots of short items off the cuff and often. Sometimes they will be. And while they won’t often be as long as this, I will take some care with them. I hope you’ll come back. Don’t be too disappointed if there’s nothing new. Your expectations should be modest, too. But our intentions don’t have to be. My name is Captain Future. I’m here to save the world.