Friday, February 12, 2021

Seven Years of Plenty Ahead!

 I finally tracked down the password and user ID for this blog. You can really confuse yourself if you try to transition out of your old server and to a new one and end up with multiple e-mail accounts. Did I mention I that ADD runs in my family? When I was struggling to get my son through school, suddenly all the things they were telling me about him sounded suspiciously familiar. I realized right away that it was going to be a case of the blind leading the blind.

I am officially old now, so I can blame some of it on that. I am on Medicare and drawing Social Security. I turned 65 a few months ago, so I can no longer even claim to be a "twenior"--my name for someone between 50 and 65. I am there. Old! 

So I am rather embarrassed to see that it has been seven years since I posted anything on this blog. However, having one of those minds that always finds a connection between things, I told myself that the seven lean years are over and that means, at least as far as my writing goes, I am poised to have seven years of plenty! 

And I have been doing a lot of writing. I just haven't published anything lately. Lately meaning almost ten years now. But I am doing a very important piece of writing--my personal history. Here is a little excerpt from the intro. 

Recently a friend posted something funny on Facebook about his “unauthorized autobiography.” For those of you who may be a little humor impaired, or perhaps not quite old enough to understand the implication of those words, allow me to explain.

 Sometimes a writer will write a biography or history of someone famous without asking their permission, interview people who knew them and worked with them, and then publish it as an “unauthorized biography.” That key word “unauthorized” tells you that you may learn things the subject of the story might not want you to know.

 An “autobiography” is when a person writes about their own life, usually filtering it in ways to present themselves in the best possible light, rather like watching the news from the point of view of only one political party.

            Hence an “unauthorized autobiography” is funny because it suggests a person writing things about themselves that they would not necessarily want others to know, spilling the beans on their imperfections, revealing things nobody would know unless they themselves told them.

 So after I read that, and laughed, then I realized that I am, in essence, writing an “unauthorized autobiography,” that is to say sharing things I would just as soon not and wish I could magically make disappear from the landscape of my life.

 But I have realized that if those things never happened, lots of other things would not have happened the way they did, and there would be no explanation for them, for me being the person that I am, both good and bad. I have struggled mightily about how and what to include, so forgive me if I have shared something you would rather not have known.

           

            Now doesn't that make you want to cheer me on to finish this particular project? A few health "challenges" have arisen lately to remind me that time is not an unlimited commodity. I am proud to say that I have finished the rough draft of the first section of my life, loosely divided into four periods of twenty years. The first installment is called, coincidentally, "Rough Draft." From age twenty to forty is called "The Plot Thickens." After that comes volume three, "An Open Book." The fourth and final volume will be entitled "Working to Deadline." 

         At one point I had wondered what I would write about from sixty on, feeling as one starts to at a certain age, that most of my grand adventures are probably behind me, but which of us could predict what was coming in 2020 and beyond? So I feel certain that as long as I am still here, there will be things to write about. 

            Carry on!

No comments:

Post a Comment