Julie has informed me that I need to write something cheery for this week’s entry. I’m going to try to fulfill her request, because fulfilling her requests is my default position in our marriage. She’s an intelligent, reasonable, practical person, so most of the time what she wants is what I want, and she spares me the effort of having to write down a daily to-do list. A long time ago I came to the conclusion that almost anything Julie wants stems from her generous stock of good will, and unless she wants me to remodel the bathroom or something else that will cause me unbearable pain, I do it. You cannot believe the amount of argument this has saved us.
As an added benefit, Julie starts feeling guilty if she’s been directing domestic traffic all day, and I can usually nurture her guilt from an embryonic abstract emotion into a full-grown literal apple pie steaming in glorious olfactory reality upon the kitchen table.
None of this would work if I didn’t have absolute confidence in Julie’s desire to make our marriage a place where we can both thrive, or if she didn’t have the same confidence in me.
Over time, the confidence we have in each other has become the most precious commodity in our lives, something I wouldn’t have believed when I was, say, twenty-nine, athletic, good-looking, bartending at Slavey’s in Ketchum, and determined never to get married. (I had plenty of confidence in myself at twenty-nine. I didn’t realize that it meant nothing unless it was backed up by the confidence of somebody else.)
Julie and I back up each other’s confidence. And that’s a seriously cheerful thing to write about.
________
Another cheerful thing is that twenty inches of snow have fallen in the past few days. We’re still pulling winter clothes and ski boots out of the crawl space, and restocking packs with emergency-overnight-in-below-zero-weather supplies. (You tend to get careless about the cold and the dark when you’re skiing through long sunny afternoons in April. What is vital equipment in December gets removed from the packs to make room for brie, salami, cashews, chardonnay, sliced apples, chocolate-covered espresso beans, and sunscreen. April is a good month for lunch.)
Now we’re refurbishing first-aid kits and finding places in our packs for years-old granola bars (January is a bad month for lunch). I’ll hot-wax our skis. I’ll spray our bindings with WD-40, which stinks awfully, but once sprayed, the bindings don’t get clogged with early-season snow and they don’t make annoying squeaks when you walk uphill. I’ll adjust our collapsible poles so they won’t collapse in the middle of the season’s first pole-plant.
When we’ve done all this, we’ll start skiing the old logging road above the Rocky Mountain Ranch. As I’ve already noted in this journal, we’ll have the option of going slow on the way out if we ski out of the track when we come back down.
Over time, if there’s a week or so of dry weather, the track will get nicely icy and it will be possible to hit dangerous speeds on the way out. Juno gets overworked at those velocities, so halfway back to the truck I usually pick her up and carry her. Since she’s harder to carry than she was as a puppy, I ski as fast as I can for a half-mile or so.
It helps if she’s tired. If she’s not, she gets nervous and squirmy ripping down a track on skis, with trees whizzing by on either side of us. I tell her she’s an honored member of the 40-40 Club (40-pound dog doing 40 miles per hour), but even when she’s tired, she growls at me when I take her in my arms. “Stop struggling,” I tell her. “We haven’t hit a tree yet.” She’s not convinced.
When she was a puppy, I’d put her in a backpack and cinch up the top with only her head sticking out, and she liked that better. It’s too bad they have to grow up, right?
________
More cheer: Our new woodstove is more efficient than the old one, so we have achieved a functional increase in the size of our woodpile. We also blew a tire getting the new woodstove home from Idaho Falls, and I realized that I couldn’t depend on the other three because they were getting, like me, old and bald, so after a masked-up trip to Hailey, we have four new aggressive-tread tires on the pickup. Les Schwab gave me a deal, and the pickup looks twenty-nine again.
Also, the snowblower started after a few pulls of the rope starter. I cleared the driveway, the path to the woodpile, and the deck. It’s still snowing, and according to the weather report I’ll have to snow blow again tomorrow and maybe the next day. No problem. Snow blowing is a cheerful exercise in November. It gets a bit tedious in January and thereafter. But it’s still November.
________
I’ve been trying to find cheer in being seventy, and it’s not as much of a struggle this morning as usual. I’m still alive. I’m still able to pack a couple of armloads of wood into the house whenever the wood box is empty. I still have my wits about me. Also, I’ve finally accepted the fact that I’m no longer an athletic and good-looking twenty-nine-year-old, bartending at Slavey’s in Ketchum.
Instead, it’s come to this: for seventy, I’m athletic. I’m no longer those other things. When Julie has to take a photo of me for publication, we have to get the light just right or I look a lot like Mark Shields on the PBS Newshour.
I’m happy to no longer be bartending at Slavey’s or anywhere else. (Slavey’s is now the Warfield Distillery and Brewery. Like a lot of other businesses in Ketchum these days, the Warfield looks mostly empty and dark when you drive by. But Christmas is coming. It remains to be seen if Ketchum in the winter of 2020-2021 will stay dark and empty, or if it will host a season-long festival of superspreading.)
But that’s not really cheerful. Here’s something that is: I’m not in the least envying my twenty-nine-year-old self. He was, as I remember, a difficult person to live with. He was playing fast and loose with his future (my present) and I’m lucky to be here today, with body and mind more or less intact.
He was not always nice to the people around him. As a bartender, he learned to be adequate. As a friend, he now and then fell down on the job. As a skier, he over-skied his abilities. He called himself a writer, but he wasn’t. He was publishing short stories, and people seemed to like them, but he mistook good luck for skill and hard work.
That year, flush with tips and getting free employee meals and free employee drinks (one per shift), he bought a Sun Valley season pass and skied a hundred days. Over those hundred days he broke five pairs of skis. Once, he went down the Warm Springs side of the mountain without turning, trying to break two minutes top to bottom. He might have, except he hit a patch of ungroomed and icy bumps between the two Warm Springs lifts. He bounced through them at seventy miles an hour, stuck both ski tips into a steep mogul, broke one ski and ripped the bindings out of the other, and did five or six rag-doll somersaults through more bumps before sliding to a stop. He walked unhurt to the bottom of the mountain.
Not an isolated incident.
Now and then I try to reach back forty ski seasons to be a small still voice in his head. “When you have to choose between fast or slow?” I whisper. “Slow, especially when you’re skiing. Nice or nasty? That’s easy. Nice. Sad or angry? Sad. Sad or cheerful? Cheerful, unless you have to blind yourself to the world you live in.
“By the way, a lot of things you think are free are going to cost you plenty. Cherish words that come easy, because there will be a time when they don’t come easy. Don’t break anyone’s heart, and that includes your own. Always quit drinking an hour before closing time. Save some cash while you can still get 5% interest on a savings account.”
He doesn’t hear me. Stupid kid. I’m about to give up on him.
________
A good friend—my age—says we have lived in the best possible time to be human. “Born in 1950 in America,” he says. “Can’t get much luckier than that.”
I believe him. At least I believe the luck part. I didn’t die in nuclear war or from Agent Orange or get AIDS or get on the wrong plane on 9/11. But beyond that, our luck needs to be qualified. If you were white, male, straight, middle-class, had parents who put your well-being ahead of theirs, graduated from college, enjoyed your work, saved enough money for retirement, had a circle of long-term friends, didn’t get divorced, stayed away from foam-at-the-mouth politics—1950 was a great year to be born. It still doesn’t let you escape being seventy and having to look back on all the things you would have done differently if you’d known then what you know now. You also can’t escape the enormous burden of not screwing up the life you have left.
________
Which makes it obvious, I suppose, that I’m not really going to give up on my twenty-nine-year-old self. I need him and his mistakes and small cruelties as cautionary examples.
I’ve known people who reached a certain point in their lives and cut off all contact with the people they once were, due to shame or embarrassment, mostly. It can be done, but it turns you into an emotional cripple, and emotional cripples are not cheerful. You die lonelier and more miserable than you would have if you’d welcomed your shameful past selves into your psyche. Those shameful past selves might be properly impressed with what you’ve done to improve them, for one thing.
The person I was when I was twenty-nine presents me with images and snatches of dialog that make me cringe. He still says things that are tactless and tasteless. He recalls, with unpleasant intensity, trusting people he shouldn’t have trusted, and the people who trusted him when they shouldn’t have. He let good-hearted people believe he might improve if they worked hard enough to improve him (which was true, decades too late). Overall, he was nasty when he could have been nice, promiscuous when he could have been faithful, stupid when he could have been smart, and went skiing when he could have read Dostoevsky. (I still go skiing when I could be reading Dostoevsky.)
My twenty-nine-year-old self must have had some instinct for self-preservation. Somewhere in the middle of that winter, he realized that bartending wasn’t a recipe for conscious development over time. His job kept confronting him with overdoses, suicides, emotional breakdowns, bankruptcies—he had run out of fingers to count them on. At some point, a still small voice did get through: “If you keep this up, you’re gonna die.” He didn’t notice whether the voice sounded like mine, but I like to think it did.
He eventually quit bartending and used his meager savings to go to grad school. There he read Dostoevsky and a bunch of French postmodernists, who all had the same lesson: once you’re in a society or occupation or family, you don’t have any free will to speak of. But you can leave those things if you find them toxic, and switch to better ones. That’s where free will resides: in picking a collective to be a part of. You cannot, however, choose not to be a part of any collective at all. Do that, and you’ve chosen emotional death.
After grad school I got a job teaching college, and that was the best stroke of luck of all.
________
It has been a happier-than-usual morning, thanks to Julie’s request. I came up with more cheerful things than I thought I would, mostly by looking inward instead of outward, toward memory instead of toward a frightening future.
You can go blind, thinking and writing this way, especially considering what is going on outside this valley. But for today I’m content to focus on the collective Julie and I have chosen: ourselves, the friends with whom we have Zoom cocktail hours with, the friends and family we email and call, the friends we see at a distance across parking lots or decks, the friends we sometimes even invite for well-distanced dinners. It’s not a terribly cheery group, because we’ve all got our eyes open to what’s going on in the world. But everybody tries to be kind. Everybody speaks the truth, and everybody makes an effort to speak it gently. That’s cause for cheer, and it gives me hope we’ll all get through these dark pestilent months with laughter and good fellowship.