An Unexpected Birthday

Five days ago was a milestone I had no intention of seeing, a birthday beyond which one can no longer even pretend not to remember life without television. Or phones before they even had dials.  Or a world without plastic for crying out loud. (We did have Bakelite, a dense, heavy proto-plastic used to make phones.  They smelled bad in hot weather.) I did not intend to live this long, instead planning a dramatic seacliff suicide in a sports car with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in F Major blasting from excellent speakers a la Anthony Perkins in Phaedra. This scene -

I can still recite every word along with him!  But somehow I never got around to it and now it’s much too late despite having the required dramatic reason.  Drama is a hard sell for the Medicare crowd

Melina Mercouri and Anthony Perkins are both dead and by now so is the old friend from Houston I haven’t seen in 40 years for whom I spent the first after-midnight minutes of this birthday, writing a little eulogy to be read by a stranger at a memorial service someplace in Texas.  That was weird but writers are traditionally expected to write for significant moments on command, and I imagined myself in that parade of scribes flourishing quill pens through history.

It was an unequivocal reminder that no matter how horrible life gets, that’s what I am – a writer. A few days earlier I’d gone with friends (who are also writers) to a booksigning by another friend, Lillian Faderman, for her fascinating and exhaustively-researched new book, Woman The American History of an Idea.  I read it before mailing it to the friend to whom I had Lillian sign it, confronting for the millionth time how utterly ridiculous is that patriarchally-defined creature, “woman.”  Of course I played the elaborately-documented-by-Faderman role assigned to my sex; there was no other! 

But from very early days I saw the unfairness and stupidity of it and quickly learned to conform to it as an act while secretly developing another persona deep inside.  I didn’t have the slightest idea what that hidden self would ever become or do, since my options were limited to getting married and having babies after working briefly as a secretary, teacher or nurse.

But one Sunday afternoon, probably in 1948 , my dad took me for a walk in our WPA-built park.  There, ensconced at a WPA cement picnic table, was a woman writing in a notebook.  My dad swept off his hat and introduced her to me.  “This is Addie McElfresh,” he said.  “She’s a writer!”  I was 4 or 5, already an avid reader, and my world changed forever.  A woman could be a writer!

Adeline McElfresh (https://www.amazon.com/Books-Adeline-Mcelfresh/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AAdeline+Mcelfresh) and my dad both wrote for the Vincennes Sun-Commercial, the local paper, but within a year she would publish the first of 57! titles under her own name and 4 different pseudonyms in the nurse/romance genre. Her most popular series featured a woman doctor –“Dr. Jane.”  Addie McElfresh died in 2015 at 97, her last book published in 2000 when she was 82.

Okay, my life’s A Dismal Swamp at the moment, but I’ve got a role model!  One keeps writing.

And then my best friend of all time, unaware that I was gearing up never to write another book because I suddenly needed to make huge amounts of money, gave me the ultimate message-in-a-gift.  A Montblanc pen.  The real thing, classic, not a ballpoint or roller ball but a brave, wine-red fountain pen crowned with a gold-plated nib. The epitome of elegance.  A pen with which to sign books.

And so I will.