Through most of my 20s and my 30s I was a community organizer, working with poor folks who were in many ways a lot like my own people, all over the country. I worked with great groups like ACORN and the People’s Alliance in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine and I trained organizers and community activists all over the country. I regularly worked 70 hours a week kicking ass, taking names and helping people make a positive difference in their lives.
I bring that up now not only for the obvious reason why a 50-something guys brings up all the things he did in his 20s, but I was thinking about how important it was to me, back then, to do significant work. I had put my writing on hold to organize for social change, and when a friend like Stewart Acuff or Larry Ginsburg would ask me what my bottom line was I would say that I just wanted to be responsible for as much good organizing to change as many people’s lives as I could, in any way I could. Whatever my success with that goal over the course of many years, I have to acknowledge that it changed over time, as my children got older and I began to think about looming tuition payments and eventually struggled through some serious difficulties that I created in my own life and the lives of people I loved.
Now, here I am, 57, and working at various writing gigs while I create a more or less daily blog that on several levels is all about contemplating my navel. It has come to this.
But I do not despair. My purpose here is not, primarily or initially, to achieve something of great significance. (Duh, that’s a good thing, hmm?). I’d like to keep getting into better and better shape so I can enjoy life more and have more of it. I’d like to stay true to my path, learn as much as I can, share some of it, and enjoy some music with friends and passersby.
It is all going pretty well. My weight has been on a plateau for about a week, but a good pal emailed me: “Don't feel sluggish about your blog. If you are at a plateau, then tell your readers. Just be honest, like you have been since day one and they'll love you for it.”
I like love, whether or not I expect it here.
Sometimes I do think about whether this is all just an exercise in self-absorption. A close friend of my ex-wife, a woman who in the past has been very good to me and mine, sent me a zinger of an email in which she asked not too cryptically: “Still on the pretentious Bus are we?”
Anyone would be a fool not to understand that the best friend of an ex-spouse tends to be placed in the role of crucible (if that can be a role, which I am sure it can’t but I am hurrying a little here) for some of the anger that the ex does not always get to express in a generally amicable parting. I don’t hold that against anyone, and I appreciate the honesty. Here’s most of what I wrote back, hoping not to be too defensive either of myself or of my blog.
“It's possible, but I didn't see that route listed when I got on, if this is a bus. As in pretense? Or pretend? I don't know. I parse the words not to play a semantic game, but to wonder honestly about your meaning. I will grant that both the premise and presentation of the blog are self-absorbed by definition, but I hoped that by mixing in liberal amounts of honesty, self-deprecation and attempted humor and entertainment (and by the mere and I think obvious fact that when one starts anything by admitting to weighing 273 pounds there is some shame, if not humility, in the enterprise), I might pull it all off while also accomplishing the face-value goal explicit in the title of the blog. I'm sure some people read it and consider it ridiculous, including those who know me and those who don't. I guess I can take your question or implicit statement that I am ‘still on [any kind of] bus’ to mean that you see it as part of a past pattern that I have revealed before. I am open to that idea, and surely it is all of a piece because it is all me. But while I have [screwed up] in the past, I have tried to own it and be responsible for it in different ways. This seems different, and positive in my intentions. But if I come across as full of myself in a simplified way, and in doing so give anyone who is pissed off at me (or whatever) another confirmation that being pissed off at me (or whatever) is the right response to me, I'm not bothered by that and I do not blame anyone for having that response….
“Maybe the whole thing is a waste of the 40-45 minutes a day I have been putting into it, but it began with some real desperation about the 273.5 that was flashing back at me from the scale's digital readout, and a hunch that I could accomplish a few things in the process. I guess I will just have to see.”
Which is true. I will. Have to see.
But meanwhile, another email I got overnight came from, Mark, an old friend who is a damned good writer in his own right. He wrote to thank me, implying that somehow my blog had got him writing poetry again.
Go figure. Do I really believe it? Not so much. Do I believe that it worked for Mark? Absolutely. Does it make me feel that there can somehow be some significance in what I am doing here for a little while each day?
Just enough.
Thanks, Mark. Keep writing.
My son's mom and I saw Tracy Chapman perform one night on the waterfront here. She was so good I can't even remember who she was opening for. She's with us this morning, opening for all of us with today's soundtrack.
Ordinarily I don't pay a lot of attention to the visual montage part of some of these Youtube video's, which is unfair of me since their creators are far more talented at what they are doing than, say, I am at creating this blog. But this one of "The Promise" is kind of stunning, almost enough to make up for something like the last few seconds being clipped off at the end of the song*.
*If you want to hear the whole song, this time with some of that ubiquitous footage of the colossally but perhaps unbearably cute Harry and Hermione, here it is.
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