Thinking You're Too Old?

 When I shed the over-complications of my old life, I found a great deal of energy. Friends directed me back to writing, and the federal government gave me the opportunity to recoup what talents I had discarded long ago. I strongly recommend you do not follow my path, just as strongly as recommend taking action regardless of your age. Youth does not hold all the cards. Time is on their side only if they use it wisely.

Consider The Past Is Unpredictable where Jan Shoemaker reviews Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing by Abigail Thomas.

Still Life At Eighty, Abigail Thomas’s smart, tender, acerbic new collection of short essays, gives us all that. She is writing at eighty but these essays are anything but still. They recount and inquire. They celebrate the familiar contours of her own beloved place while nudging the edge of mystery. They are frank and fearless.

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If aging well is an art, Abigail Thomas has mastered it. Still Life At Eighty is a montage of moments that are wry and generous and illuminating. If I count up all the times I answered, “Amen!” or “Damn straight!” it’s even interactive. All of the virtues that ought to come with age are there and few of the bad actors like parochialism, intolerance, and self-righteousness, as if having invented the fable of our own correctness and success, we end up buying the story in which case there is a bridge in Brooklyn we might sell ourselves. Instead, with this memoirist as guide, there is humility and vulnerability and wonder and the long view that comes with enough decades. And paradox—because that’s the stuff of mystery and the currency of life. “The past is unpredictable,” Thomas says. She has lived and loved and written long enough to know.   

Just try. I can say not trying seems painless, but it is a pain submerged which will rise up in rebellion against its submersion and wreck far and far wide. 

sch 1/9/23