Martahon

From a letter to his friend, Rob McCaskill.

Appreciate you pining for my company. I’m lucky to be such a wonderful person, though it’s sometimes hard on others. I’m living in a state of disbelief — this job just won’t end. Haven’t seen a friend since early fall, if not summer. I go weeks with my head down, just working, toughing it out, then it hits me again how strange this is, how long I’ve been shut in. Would enjoy a psychological examination right now. Maybe by a good novelist rather than a shrink. Would like to have someone else put into words the subtle ways this long detention has affected me. I think I’m getting prematurely old. Not in a physical sense, but emotionally. I think about the old days more and more. I take walks mentally around Holiday Ranch. That part of my life is increasingly vivid, utterly desirable, the way childhood gets for people in their 60s and 70s. This concerns me a little, though it might be good for me as a writer. I think it’s just a phase. A compensation. I’m mentally without food, so my mind is re-digesting itself. Want to move beyond this — get back my appetite for new experience and, of course, the time to indulge it. But, for now, those few years seem endlessly rich to me. It feels as if I could spend the rest of my life in recollection of the first 20. An odd twist to this is that what makes those years so great, even now, is that they were the years of looking forward. What would I be when I got older? What would I go out into the world and do? If I were the novelist trying to sum this up, I’d say we have a character here who thinks he’s homesick, but what he really wants is to be sick of home. Again. He wants to yearn for adulthood and the wide world again. They’ve gotten stale. If he could walk around those enchanted acres of boyhood again until they lose their enchantment and feel like they really did most of the time when he couldn’t get away from them, he might recover his old lust for life. Here I am in New York, in 2004, looking westward at my young self in 1974 looking eastward. What a couple of dreamers we are.

In between us, of course, are a stretch of adult years that seem more disappointing than not. In time they’ll ripen and seem as rich as any other time I’ve looked forward to or wanted over again. Life goes on and on like this. As this temporary freelance project goes on and on. The great moments are few and far between, though not as few as I usually assume. As I think about it now, there are a lot of them. They’re not the kind of moments I will tell family or friends about: they don’t seem to amount to anything. They’re not a trip to Europe, they’re not a Springsteen concert, they’re not finishing a book, they’re not a new girlfriend. They’re just going outside for coffee, needing to hurry back to my desk, but the weather is so poignant I realize I should take my time, and do. “I took a walk a couple of times last month, and felt so good I won’t even try to describe it.” A year goes by and I haven’t gotten out of town or taken a woman to dinner, and I decide I’ve been a failure this year, too. Not counting the times that were transcendent, it was all pretty dull. This is not to say a few good walks are enough. Want nothing right now more than to get this software launched so I can have regular work hours for awhile, and get some variety back into my life.1

1. Email to Rob, March 4, 2004