At Large

An’ here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice
– Bob Dylan

One might suspect that after decade upon decade spent meandering this fair Earth of ours, even a besotted toadstool might’ve acquired a nugget or two of what passes as wisdom, but then, that’s a hard thing to verify, at least for yours truly, who has never once encountered a tipsy ‘shroom. Some of these I’ve come to all by my little lonesome, others from observation and/or experience. Let’s leave it up to the reader to decide their usefulness.

Never having been one who felt the need to acquire things for things’ sake, it’s nonetheless struck me as remarkable how much less than even that I require in this, what anyone under the age of 40 likely would describe as my dotage. Fear not – Invisible Old Person has returned to tell you all about it, and once again I promise to not write this in cursive.

• We all are winging it. No exceptions. Remember when you were a little kid and blithely assumed your parents and grandparents, and, in fact, all adults, had everything under control, that somehow, they’d been able to make sense of all this? Well, no. Whenever you might feel all alone, fumbling along, you’re not. The best sense of it all may well be to have no sense of it at all.

• A while back, my eldest offspring was cleaning out an old shed that was, of its own accord, about to hit the deck for good even without his assistance. In the midst of the future pile of rubble, he located a journal in which my teenage self had much to say about what boiled down to two main themes: my girlfriend and the state of my golf game.

Who was that person? Eventually it penetrated my hard Dutch-German skull: You will not be the same person at, let’s say, the age of 60, as you were at 40, much less at 20, or particularly at 16. There will be several versions of “you” in your lifetime. Your core you should more or less remain you, but then there are the other yous that fill in around the edges, with the possibility of an occasional life-altering event that, well, alters your life and administers a corkscrew or two to that core. It’s tough to say what use one could make with this information, except maybe don’t read those old journals, lest you run into someone foreign to the you you’ve become, not the alleged you who cooked up those words in the first place.

• Use your turn signal. If you’re going to turn, that is.

• Assuming that others are always operating with the best of intentions is a fool’s errand. Having had the great good fortune of growing up in a family in which good intentions and a splash of altruism was present, it took me several years into this adulthood thing to realize such a thing is patently untrue in the world at large. This does not come sans a few flesh wounds and possibly a dip in that patch of quicksand they’ve been warning you about for years. From this vantage point, I’d call that college.

• If you have a headache, drop a bowling ball on your foot. Thus spaketh my dad, a man full of pithy wisdom, a fair amount of which will not see the light of day in this family magazine.

• How terribly fragile everything is. Everything. Yes, we all meander about as if we own the place, but let’s take a brief look at a few of the things that could occur in the next ten seconds. The power could blink out; you could get off the sofa to go turn off the tea kettle and, in the process, fall and break your ankle; a bowling ball could come through the roof and land on your sofa and/or you; or you could open a letter from some rando lawyer only to learn you’d inherited a million dollars from your rich uncle whom you’d always thought could barely afford a sixer of Billy Beer. Bottom line? What is true one second may not be true the next.

• When it comes to ingesting a piece of cake or pie, I was once instructed by an older friend, start at the large end first. Whyzzat?, queried my younger self. Why, that way you won’t get shorted if you get hit by lightning or have a heart attack before you’re finished. This from the same chap who vociferously advised me to never again ride my sled across the road in front of his car in the dark, advice I totally took to heart.

• Compound interest. It is your friend. Seize hold of this immutable, brute fact at as young an age as possible and hold on for dear life. Your older self will thank you. Patience. 

• This one bugs me to no end regardless how many foot-pounds worth of energy over time I’ve put into trying to convince myself it simply has to be my doing. Regardless of the effort you might put into it, maintaining every valuable friendship you’ve made along your journey is impossible. Forget it. Can’t be done. For the longest time, I figured I was losing touch with folk because I wasn’t being a real good friend, that I could do better. Then it struck me: I’m but half of that equation, and, oftentimes, no matter how much effort I may have put into it, the speed of life usually wins out.

• Prospective writers, write what you know. For a stretch as a young-un, yours truly was hellbent on inventing some whole new thing in some whole new place that I knew nothing about, which has not always proved a deterrent, but in this case it was a matter of attempting to fly before learning to crawl. Further, if you are taking lessons on how to deploy the English language from such august sources as, for instance, nearly everyone’s favorite word processing program, you’d be far better off starting over, first by putting down your laptop and then by indulging heavily in works populating what’s considered the canon of literature, things like J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Just sayin’, as they say.

Yes, with full awareness that a canon of anything is a highly subjective matter, the idea here is to begin with, and establish for yourself, a stable foundation of how language is best used, not necessarily the message any of these works convey. Were I, for instance, to establish a list of my very own, chances are good I’d begin with Atwood, Pynchon, and Camus.

 • The world is not paying attention to your every move or any of your moves at all, truth be told. Unless you have, or perhaps are about to have, some truly immediate impact on their life, such as crossing three lanes of traffic to make a left, very few are paying attention to the slightest thing you’re up to, one reason I find it beyond silly how much trouble the gubmint goes to track your every movement. What nefarious things could I possibly be up to? Wouldn’t they like to know! 

• A possible corollary to that is “everybody is a star.” No, no, no. No. Remember that tune? Trouble is, of course, not everybody is a star. No, it’s not tough to see the message this attempts to convey, that we all are of some value, regardless of station in life or IQ points, and you’ll get no argument here. The troublesome part? When the utterly average – average as defining most of us – being comes to that realization, it can arrive with a major dollop of disappointment, precisely the thing that the original premise was attempting to avoid.

• Don’t assume. Anything. Ever. Whatever it is, it has not happened until it has happened. As Yogi Berra said of the 1973 New York Mets rocky road to the pennant, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” No, it ain’t. If you are resolute in your mission to unscrew yourself completely from reality, I’d start by ignoring this axiom. It’s tough to think of a quicker road to disappointment than by – here it comes – counting your chickens before they hatch. Anticipation of some enjoyable happening can be fun. Start by reveling in that anticipation prior to jumping for joy that Aunt Mabel plans to deposit 10,000 no-strings-attached dollars into your savings account on Friday. (She may change her mind at the last second.)

• Memories as critical to one’s well-being. Savor them. Who returns to their cache of photos and videos taken at a concert, sporting event, or whatever? What you wind up with is a memory of you recording the event, rather than the event itself, which, in the grand scheme, seems counterproductive. I say this as someone who once took thousands of photos of theatrical performances as part of my job. What do I remember of those performances? The memorable photos that resulted from all that snapshotting. 

• Last but not least, practice situational awareness. Here’s another that bubbles up straight from the pet peeve category. This could range from not suddenly stopping on a crowded sidewalk to look at your dumbphone to, yes, not abruptly crossing those three lanes of traffic to make a left turn. Be where you are. Give it a try.

All this, and I still cannot be one hundred percent certain why Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.