Birthday Thoughts, Nov.
3, 2008
When H.G. Wells turned 70 in 1936, PEN
(Poets, Playwrights Essayists and Novelists) threw a birthday dinner for him.
It was fitting, as Wells himself had been
one of the founders of PEN, along with Joseph Conrad and Bernard Shaw -- the
latter among the dinner guests. And PEN survives him and the other founders,
fighting for the rights and dignity of writers around the world.
Wells told his fellow writers on that
long-ago occasion that he felt like a little boy who'd had a lot of fun
playing, until his nurse told him: "Now Master Bertie, it's getting late.
Time you began to put away your toys."
I'm only 67 today but I'm getting there.
Yet, strangely, I feel younger in some ways than I did ten or 20 years ago,
when I was a single man and had no great hope of ever being otherwise. Velvet
has brought me more joy and more contentment that I could have ever imagined.
I have seen things and read things and
experienced things that would never have been part of my life but for her. But
even beyond that, thanks to her, I have a normal life. I have a real home, not
a ratty apartment; and a real new family, even if it's a stepfamily. Even
everyday routines like housework and yardwork, although as tiresome to me as to
anyone, somehow take on new meaning.
It won't last forever, of course. But
that doesn't seem to matter to me as much as it once did. It is a comfort to me
that the world will go on, that people I care about - including my new
stepchildren and step-grandchildren -- will go on. I have never understood the
appeal of solipsism, the notion that the world is just an illusion, that when
you die, it dies. Today, knowing the kind of life that had eluded me before,
solipsism strikes me as a truly horrible idea.
It's not as if I'm overjoyed with the
state of the world; indeed, it seems we have a load of trouble. Yet the
human race has endured troubles since the dawn of time, and I can hope that the
same will be true in the future -- if only, to borrow an old British
expression, by "muddling through." I think there are still enough
decent people in the world to manage that.
It was at a pre-wedding party in 2005
that I came up with a toast -- my first ever, I believe. It wasn't planned, it
sprang into my mind quite spontaneously and unexpectedly:
"Be happy for us. Be happy for
yourselves. Life is good, the world is good, can you but see it."
About a year later, for "Deer Meadow
Shuffle," I wrote a passage which, although I didn't think of it at the
time, I later realized could be adapted into another toast, which I leave with
you now:
"To our dreams, and to our love, and
to the things we fashion from them."
I'll try to pass whatever years remain to
me in that spirit. IÕm not putting away my toys. However
long or short a time I have from here, I can't complain.
--Brantley Thompson Elkins