The Pleasure of Writing While Old

With a lifetime of experience to share, I'm never at a loss for words--or conviction that the story matters.

Manet sketched a woman who can’t write fast enough. WkiArt, public domain.

Sometime around my seventieth birthday, I made a declaration to my husband. We were sitting at the dining room table, with two clean plates and a bottle that had once held a satisfying wine. Same place, same moment in the arc of a day as other life-altering decisions: to downsize, upsize, adopt our first dog on the brink of old age. We arrived at those decisions together. This one was mine alone. After a lifetime of doubt, I knew what I wanted to be.

A writer.

My husband looked puzzled. This was news?

In 50-odd years of marriage, he’d seen me write plenty. Articles that slipped between the ads of one magazine or another. My monthly editorial for Chatelaine (“I always read you first,” subscribers used to say). A vanished blog, a hopping Facebook page. None of it Writing with a capital W. I’d been introduced at parties as “Rona, who writes the most amazing Facebook posts.” What did that make me? A Facebookist?

I’d written a book, a memoir called My Mother’s Daughter. Even gone on tour, back when publishers picked up the tab. My business card ducked the question of what to call myself. Why not “writer?” I told anyone who asked, “I’m not a writer. I’m just someone who writes when she has something to say.”

My canine muse had acquired a graying muzzle and an arthritic spine since I wrote Chapter One.

All I meant to say, I said in My Mother’s Daughter. Nearly 10 years went by before I made a fitful start on another memoir. It had a title, Starter Dog, but no narrative arc. Every few months I would crow, “I’ve got it!”, only to reject my shiny new plan as one more phantom. My canine muse had acquired a graying muzzle and an arthritic spine since I wrote Chapter One in his gamboling days. Paul and I had a mordant little joke: Better crack the code of this book before the Starter Dog himself… well, ended.

Now here I was, astonished, proud and just plain tickled to be an old writer hitting her prime.

Old. It’s the truth. I’ve earned it. Old china, old houses and Old Masters are sought out, contemplated and treasured. What’s wrong with being an old dame writing? I’m still me without a smooth brow and knees that can hike the toughest hill on the Camino. Without writing? Forget it.

Writing while old, I draw stories from a jewel box of memories. I am 75, except when I write. Then I’m any and every age that brought me here. I’ll never run out of stories, only time in which to weave a design from all this wild abundance. People I once resented make me grateful to have known them, releasing a wave of tenderness. What they withheld from me I don’t need anymore. I nod along with Hayden Carruth in his poem “Testament,” written in his old age: “Now I am almost entirely love.” Everything I write is a love letter to the world.

Growing up, I seemed destined to write. Kids who ignored me at recess would thrill to the stories I told. But I wanted a choice, not a destiny. Writing was the family business, the CEO my hard-driving mother. She expected results, and I got them: prizes in contests, a short story published, through her contacts, in Ladies’ Home Journal. The burbling sidebar made me cringe: “‘Prodigy’ describes the 15-year-old author of PAPER FLOWERS to perfection.”

My short story appeared in this issue. Cover model Barbara Bach, then 17, has been married to Ringo Starr since 1981.

I turned my back on writing and thrived in the magazine business. For 30 years it nourished the family income along with my pleasure in word craft. Then I left my pinnacle job and found myself adrift. I remembered Robert Frost’s definition of home: “the place where, when you have to go there, it has to take you in.” Just how I felt about writing. A hard-backed chair, not a velvet couch. Bare floors, not Tibetan carpet. Writing is not about comfort. But the door is open. You don’t need an invitation. You take a deep breath and enter.

Compared to many writers, I had it easy—the mortgage paid, my son launched. But words that move readers don’t come easily to writers. A spoilsport voice within keeps nattering, “Who cares about this manuscript?” and “What if it never sells?” At the end of a working day, a plumber can point to toilets merrily flushing, a dentist to teeth buffed and filled. A writer? Only a peer can guess how long it takes to dismantle what I wrote yesterday. Ugly writing annoys me. If it’s someone else’s, I stop reading. If it’s mine, I start over. I have to love my own words before readers can love them back.

Young writers squeeze writing in around their day jobs and domestic duties. Old writers get to put writing first, and do it for love. The less time I have remaining, the pickier I am about how to spend it. What I don’t love, I do pretty close to never.

As a writer, I have the privilege of enchantment with conundrums I alone can crack.

In the right line of work, I can throw my arms around the downside. I left Magazine Land when I fell out of love with corporate rigmarole. As a writer, I have the privilege of enchantment with conundrums I alone can crack. If I quit on a story that won’t take wing, nobody will be the wiser. Then again, my problem child of a story could become the friend that whispers to someone, “This is your story too. It matters.”

I thought I could choose to be a writer, but writing had chosen me. I make sense of experience with words, not with a plumbing snake or a dental drill. I have been the who-cares, it’ll-never-sell writer who brushes her discoveries aside and bears the ache for them in silence. Dear Someone, now I choose to keep writing to you. We’ve reached the end of one more letter, you and I. You could be chopping an onion or calling your mother, but you’ve chosen to read my testament.

If I were a dancer, I’d have hung up my pointe shoes long ago. I’m a lucky old dame. As a writer, I’m still beginning.

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Your turn now, dear Someone. What do you most enjoy about growing older? I’d love to hear from you and promise to answer. I could be chopping an onion myself, but I’d rather get to know the readers who keep me writing.

Between posts, I think about you. Not just your names but your lives and faces, if you’ve been with me for a while. You may not be a writer yourself. But by inspiring this writer, you’re an honorary member of the tribe.