Not too long ago Margaret emailed this poem to me from another room. It’s called “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon:
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
The details differ but these are our days now. They are made up of repeated activities almost ritually enacted. Some are personal habits, some are best practices prudently repeated, others are simply what we do now. Many of ours happen to be enforced by our ritually-minded dog. He has his own personal rituals as well, that sometimes become part of ours.
We cherish these elements of the day, more often consciously at this age. They approach the sacramental. For we know that at any moment it could be otherwise, and that someday, it will.
As it happened, shortly after I received this poem I dipped into a volume of interviews with poets done by Bill Moyers called The Language of Life (1995.) I flipped through the pages, reading randomly, until I came upon the interview with the eminent anthologist and poet Donald Hall, and remembered that he and Jane Kenyon had been married. He was devoted to her. An interview with her was also included in this volume. Both were probably done when Moyers did another documentary just on them in 1993, in their New England country home, which had been in Hall's family for generations.
At the time, Donald Hall had just survived two serious cancer surgeries. It was between those two surgeries that his wife Jane Kenyon wrote “Otherwise.” Hall was 64, and told Moyers he didn’t expect to live to 70.
That isn’t what happened. Donald Hall lived until 2018, a few months shy of his 90th birthday. But even though Jane Kenyon was nearly 20 years younger than he, she contracted a very aggressive form of cancer and died in 1995, the year the Moyers book was published. So Donald Hall lived nearly 20 years longer, but without her.
So we live now, gratefully, in the charmed space before the coming catastrophes. When it seems catastrophe may be coming for this country and this planet, of a kind we could never before even contemplate, not even in the years of the nuclear arms race. And inevitably catastrophe will come for us personally. It may not come for years or a decade or more, but it can come at any time.
When we retired eight years ago we did not travel. Many people do, but we had no desire to travel. Personally, I traveled enough in my working life, and those experiences still haunt my dreams. I may still fantasize other places, but the realities of travel grow more difficult every day, and not even primarily because of age. Although I suspect many people our age are less keen on going places.
In fact for us, all public life has diminished. Covid had and still has a marked influence. We shop for food, we go to the beach or the forest or the shores of the bay. We walk but usually in the neighborhood with our dog Howdy. Mostly we are at home: Margaret, Howdy and me. Margaret and I are both introverts who had occupations that required some very extroverted activities. Now we don't. Howdy likes it that way, too.
There is Zoom, and Margaret is on that pretty frequently. I’ve seen my doctor on it, participated in a few conversations with her family, that’s all. For me the drawbacks of social media outweigh advantages I can see.
I do miss focused opportunities to communicate something more or less meaningful from my life—a legacy still alive. It’s a cliché now—that the old have a lot to tell, a lot to share, and an eagerness to do so, but usually no one who is interested in hearing it. I know it was a long time before I was interested in the lives of my parents before my time. Or anything before my time. It was a long time before it even occurred to me that they might have anything relevant from their lives to tell me about what I was going through in my own. And by that time, they were gone.
To some extent I was right—when I was principally concerned with “career” in areas they had no knowledge of, and of navigating relationships including those that might lead to marriage, the rules of the games had changed so much—and they were also related to those places and strata that my elders didn’t know. But later, approaching middle age say, there were probably a lot of common areas, experiences and so on. Or if I knew more about their lives—what they were like, what they thought and felt at different points in their lives, I could draw my own conclusions.
It’s also context: now that I’m interested enough to research the past, the years in which they lived their lives, I have contexts in which their answers might make sense. I would experience the story. (This too is not uncommon; apparently as we get older, we become more interested in the historical contexts and events of our parents’ generation.)
As for telling my story or any part of it, even in fragments sharing anything learned in my life, well: Now I am so distant from family, I don’t see the next generation in their middle years or the generation following in their childhood. Or my sisters as they follow me into the 70s. And I share so little with the worlds in which Margaret’s children and grandchildren live, I have little to offer them, though I have a small positive place in their lives, I believe.
My status as a writer is so distant in time now that it no longer exists, so even in that regard I am not ever asked to offer anything from my life and experience. It is also distant somehow in space, for I have seldom been asked in the 28 years we’ve been here. I gave one talk derived from the mall book to a church service, one talk about the Federal Theatre Project to a theatre audience, and that’s it, over nearly three decades.
At this point, my byline hasn’t been seen regularly for nearly a decade, but even when it was, no one thought to ask me anything.
So I project my memories through the Internet, or at least (so far) very selective ones. I have my say to cyberspace, where potentially millions could read it, but which only a handful do. Many of those I suspect are my contemporaries. We talk to ourselves.
As for legacy beyond my life, what could it possibly be, and for whom? My writing disappeared along with the periodicals that printed it. My book may be re-purposed as a history (I’ve given up hope that it will ever be considered as literature) but only for a few.
A few—a few at a time—it all I can hope for. A reader here or then who stumbles across something on the Internet. I know it happens, I occasionally hear from them in some way. I have no idea how long the servers will keep my words accessible, but it could be a kind of legacy. At least for awhile.
People don’t seem interested in legacy anymore, unless from someone famous, whose possessions become negotiable currency as well as talismanic objects. In this age of de-cluttering, people don’t seem to keep things: no more attics of generational keepings, nothing that becomes more magical as the years go by.
But my world and this world grow increasingly different. I have as few hopes of relevance as of anyone listening. I haven't stopped writing, however. That kind of faith is hard to shake. It's too much a part of me, a big part, a defining part. For better or worse, richer or poorer etc.
For me the past is present, part of the rolling present, part of the texture of the days. Some of it doesn’t last. I read of pasts I haven't experienced and that process can delight me. I seem to have absorbed something added to my perspective, but that can matter only in its function of adding texture to today.
It’s the same with legacy, I suppose. We have no control over anything but the present, and only within ever increasing limits. So we adapt and we live as best and as happily as we can, until it is otherwise.
