Thoughts on Having Reached a Certain Age

When I first retired, I was often bored, and I tried to find spare legal work to do. It was nearly impossible. I was frustrated and impatient with my life.

Then I thought, what? I don’t have to go into an office and listen to old white men brag about how they invented the Federal Rules of Evidence. Nor did I have to deal with the unreasonable deadlines of clients who hadn’t paid anything for a year.

Maybe I was bored, but it wasn’t the world’s job to entertain me. Maybe I didn’t have anything meaningful to do, but when had that not been true? I began reading everything—news sources, histories, economics, law, contemporary literary fiction—that I had been missing, and then a friend suggested that I write this blog, and then I discovered that old novel on an external hard drive, and Bob’s your uncle.

Now I don’t have enough time for all of the reading I want to do. I’ve learned what should come naturally to old people: make the best of the necessary compromises and resign yourself.

At the end of one’s life, isn’t that the best one can do? And the easiest on the soul, rather than agonizing over failures and losses?

All right, here’s how I’ve begun to look at my life:

When I was young, I thought I was going to be John Updike. I’m surprised I didn’t take up smoking and affecting a stutter. I obligingly went out and got this useless MFA in creative writing. I think I published three short stories out of the tens that I wrote. I’ve written four novels, only one of which was seriously considered by a publisher—and she held it for 18 mortal months before rejecting it.

Nancy and I coauthored and published two books on law and social issues that sold badly. I wouldn’t approach a publisher about a third one. The first question is always, “How were the sales on your previous book?” But the first one was a finalist for book of the year from the American Bar Association, and they didn’t choose a winner, so I’m going to say we won.

Though the books didn’t sell, the editors liked them. The editor of the second one was so enthusiastic about it that he lied about how well it would sell, what attention it would get. That’s not nothing.

And then, after I gave up writing fiction, here comes a surprise. I’ve told this before in this venue, but maybe you didn’t read it. I needed to find my legal forms, and they weren’t on my newer laptop. I’m not practicing law; I needed to amend our neighborhood’s agreement on managing our well.

Then I remembered an ancient external hard drive that was in a drawer upstairs. I found all of my forms there. Glancing at the directory, I also saw a copy of the third novel I wrote. I pulled it up, read a chapter, thought, well, that’s not terrible, and then the next chapter, that’s even less bad, and it got better the more I read.

So I decided to revise it, and I’m almost done. (I sound like the contractors in The Money Pit—when asked when the renovation work will be done, they always say, “Two weeks!”) My cousin has worked with a group of writing teachers in Boston, and they all have great credentials. I’m going to hire one of them to tell me if there’s anything to this. I imagine that she or he will say, “No, see, here’s a fatal flaw, I wouldn’t bother with this anymore.”

And then I’ll find something else to do with it. I think it is damned good. Really. Which means it’s terrible. But it is so much better than the novel I wrote 20 years ago. It’s richer, smarter, funnier, more complete, everything good.

And THAT is the compromise I’m willing to make. I am not a failure as a writer of literary prose fiction after all. I do have the ability to write a novel. If I can’t sell it, fuck them. I’ve read way too many books that I know are inferior to this one. I am going to be happy no matter the outcome.

Next spiritual resignation: I never rose anywhere near to the top of any profession. With my MFA in creative writing, I took a job as an instructor in the English Department at Auburn University, my (yuck) alma mater.

I knew I wouldn’t get a Ph.D. in English. Already in 1980, when I would have made that decision, there weren’t any teaching jobs, and I had no interest in a Ph.D anyway. I wasn’t detail oriented like a scholar, and I had little interest in the arcane literary theories busting out in those days. I’ve always thought that words mean what they say, and I’m not interested in pursuing it otherwise. Paul de Man can fuck right off.

With an MFA, though, I could conceivably get a tenure-track job if I published enough. You already know that I did not. So I failed, essentially, to become a professor of English.

It was 1982, a recession, and I spent the previous summer driving around looking for jobs. Nothing. Just like seventeen other instructors and graduate students in English, I went to law school. (A hippie townie girl I knew as an undergrad is now some kind of dean at Indiana Law!)

I finished in the top 20% of a top 25 law school, not bad, but not law review, like Nancy, who finished at number 4. Law review etc. I’ve felt pretty inferior since.

And my law career was inferior. I worked at a firm less prestigious out of law school (though the lawyers at her firm were arrogant, narcissistic, and condescending). She didn’t like private practice any more than I did—introverts, we weren’t going to be any good at glad-handing southern boys for business, and our accents didn’t fit—so first Nancy and then I took in-house jobs in the Research Triangle Park of NC.

She was successful, I had to quit to avoid being fired, and we moved for her next job to Wilmington, DE, maybe our favorite place to live. So funny! (The next post will take up the murder trial of Tom Capano, a prominent lawyer who killed his girlfriend.) I got a position at AIG, a horrible place you’ve read about. Nancy soon left her job at Dupont-Merck, a pharmaceutical joint venture, to teach at Widener University’s law school. (Joe Biden taught there on Saturdays, but she never met him.)

She thrived, of course, and was going to get tenure at Widener. I was constantly stressed and depressed (anti-depressants didn’t help) and finally nearly had a heart attack. I was mired at an Associate General Counsel position, and, even though I was in line to be promoted to General Counsel, I didn’t want it. That would have just killed me (don’t know how you did it, Robert).

Then we moved to Seattle for Nancy’s job, and I got work as Of Counsel to a Seattle software boutique firm, where, ironically, my work was more sophisticated and nationwide in nature than the work that Nancy’s smug former firm in Greensboro is doing. My major client, T-Mobile, loved me, and I did good work.

But: the bottom line is that I was never a partner in a law firm and never a general counsel. I was a minor everything.

It’s OK, though. Nancy said that I was emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually unsuited to the practice of law, and it was only through sheer persistence and intelligence and I’d made a success of it. Well, define "intelligence" and “success”.

But it’s OK. She’s a lot smarter than I am and intellectually much better suited to the practice of law; she notices details. I’m resigned to all of this now.

For I had always thought that I had but three skills: writing, editing, and teaching. When Kate was ripping through all of the math I didn’t have the aptitude for, Nancy could help her. I realized that I was easily the stupidest person in the house.

All in all, I can accept these epiphanies. I wasn’t fit for anything—academia or the legal world—anyway. I didn’t change the world, but who has? It’s all OK.

There’s just one thing I messed up and can’t find a compromise around. I’m not going to go into details. It’s only the concept that is important.

Forty years ago, I had a pretty clear choice, though I didn’t think it was. I made the wrong choice. I didn’t know myself well enough, and I chose wrong. On this point, there is no compromising, saying how it all turned out OK on some spectrum. There is an enormous hole in my life and my heart, and nothing can fill it. To paraphrase Robert Frost, I chose the wrong path, and that has made all the difference.

I went the wrong way.