Being Upper-Middle Aged
chart of progress on my novel-in-progress
I’m trying something new, which is to record this as I walk. I’m walking through a forest, the White Tail Deer Trail, just outside of Hamilton, with my dog Happy and my son’s dog, Baxter. I will take out all the ums and muttering. Also, I’ve just swallowed a mosquito who doesn’t seem to endorse my goal of writing something for my Substack.
I’ve been thinking about, um, age. I’m what I’m calling upper-middle aged. I’m 62. And I began thinking about it tonight because I saw an advertisement for an out-of-town professor job in creative writing, which
I normally would have applied for. However, I guess I have realized that I’m at a stage in my life where I don’t want to go through the usually depressing rigmarole of applying for it, let alone if I were successful and got the position. At this point, I’m not sure I want to up-end my life so radically. To teach full time. Commute a long way several days a week. Committees. All of it. I love teaching and I love writing, but I don’t want to have to work so hard to jump into a new full-time career. I figure I’ve arrived at a balance in my life. With writing, teaching, editing, family and indolent napping. And so, I think I don’t need to work so hard at a new job. But the more important realization is that I feel that I’m able to write the best work of my life, and I have decades ahead of me to do that, assuming...well, good luck, good health and other such contingent things. I’m fortified to realize that I feel that I have never felt more interested in writing, more enthused about it, and open to the possibility of creating new things and new kinds of things. So that feels very satisfying. I certainly don’t feel too old or too weary or too worn out for that. I feel more energy than ever for creativity and indeed, I’m creating more than ever. I don’t have as much need to prove myself in the academy and also, in any case, perhaps that ship has sailed. The trireme has left without me. Good thing. I don’t want that kind of Odyssey. I’d like to not have things get in the way of my creative work—other than the teaching, mentoring and editing that I already do. Neither my wife nor I have a pension, but we’re ok. So this is an interesting realization for me in terms of the difference, perhaps, between career and vocation, I feeling excited just to get on with what is the most important to me, and maybe not worry so much about the career that I had imagined previously, that I would have had, that I wanted to have, and that I kind of assumed that I would have. But instead, I’m free to write. To choose who I mentor and teach and what editing projects to take on. For example, this summer, I held back on editing and mentoring so that I could have more time to work on a new novel. Now, I’m at 35,000 words, likely about halfway through the draft.
I remember reading my eldest son the book Pat the Bunny and the grandmother is wearing a cardigan and rocking on a rocking chair being old. By the time I got the revised edition for my daughter, the grandmother had running shoes for jogging and was not just sucking her teeth on the porch but living an active life. Is this all to say that 62 is the new 42? Not sure, but my kids’ grandma (my mom) still goes on hiking and bike trips at 84. When she first got a pacemaker, she noticed that she got tired on a bike trip in the Pyrenees. She reported this to her doctor who adjusted her pacemaker and said something to the effect of “Oh, we had it on old lady setting. We didn’t think you’d need more than that.”
In other news, my new novel, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead comes out soon (see the poster for the launches in Hamilton and Toronto.)
