I’ve been reading too much me. 

                  When we introduced Carll’s Book of the Month Club this September, I characteristically underestimated the enormity of the undertaking. True, the first two years of titles existed at least in part, but all would require buffing and a few, alas, a return to the factory for repairs. Even perfected texts needed a last look, cover art, prefatory and explanatory words. Add to these the regular lub-dub of my literary heart, these daily missives, and I was committing myself to a publication schedule of almost two thousand words a day. Journals, letters, endnotes, and garrulous groans would expand my pile.

                  Was I mad? A masochist? Suicidal? Setting myself up to fail?

                  Was I mad? A masochist? Suicidal? Setting myself up to fail?

                   No, just 75, with death’s jackboots spooking my dreams. 

                  I’m feeling fine, thanks. But 75 is 75. My end heaves into sight. (Nautical analogies allowed – I’m rereading Moby Dick.) Each body part is losing a step, some faster than others. The grotesque and pathetic effects of aging are daily displayed in the headlines. God save me from babbling, shuffling, slurring, swelling, ranting, and hallucinating in public like our esteemed Commander-in-Chief.

                  Why not turn my back on the mountain and lope through my remaining time? Who needs so much posthumous Carll? Isn’t my panic preposterous self-importance? 

                  Yes and no. I do dream of being read a century hence, as I read Thoreau in a college carrel, that rainy Saturday, rain blurring the windows, almost six decades back. I do not dream of mobs reading me, only that one young person, so lost, lonely, and alone. In Emily Dickinson’s words:

If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one Life the Aching,
Or cool one Pain,
Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again,
I shall not live in Vain.

                  My words are my lifeline – to you – and that searching soul beyond. And if I do not prep and primp my words for their audition, who will?

                  My reaction to my old words, some half my age, interests me. At some, I gulp: what was I thinking! At others I glow – laugh, weep, exclaim. This is neither vanity nor nostalgia: I accord my bygone self no special treatment, deep-sixing my drek without a quiver of remorse. The vitality of my best astonishes. Even while denying my calling, I was living it.

                  Immersion in me blinds me to all I’m not noticing. Even from writers we prize we seek a break. I want to be reading Henry James, Hawthorne, T.S. Eliot, the divine Emily, recent authors Jane extols, Shakespeare, always Shakespeare, and… don’t get me started. And I want to be strolling museums and schmoozing with pals, from whom I would learn so much. And I ought to know more about the Great American Shit-Show, however abhorrent. Instead my diet is me. Even in my dreams I’m tweaking, arranging, revising.

                  Enough caterwauling. The flipside of my grievance is fervent gratitude. Each day brings me measurably closer to tidying my remains, so I can leave futurity the best I was. Who enjoys such luck? How many get to revel in revisiting their vanished selves?  My past is lost in the mists of memory, mostly but not all. My words are the same as when I tucked them in, with a kiss. Now, thanks to you, technology, luck, they can wake and sing.

                  Fecundity hardly guarantees profundity. Time, that ruthless hanging judge, will pass sentence. But what a relief to have given my offspring their chance. Grumpy as I am at so much me, my heart sprouts wings.