SELF-DISCOVERY #1 (more to follow)

Writing this Blog has been a voyage of discovery. The very writing of just one idea stimulates memory and you dredge up material you had lost years ago.

I remember my feeling when I read “Angela’s Ashes.” Frank McCourt seemed to have total recall of everything from his poverty-stricken childhood, trying to survive a drunken father right down to specific word-for-word conversations he had or heard between his parents and his brother Malachi. How does anyone recall all that? Is it part memory? Part invention? I recall having heard long before the book, Frank and Malachi did an “act” portraying their turbulent early family life. So maybe it was part memory, part invention, and part clever writing.

I was in touch with a group of writers who wrote memoirs. Their advice was: “Don’t sweat remembering every little detail. Just start writing. The memories will pop up.”

It worked. I started to write a memoir about my mother, an unusual woman whose declining years were passed in a fog of dementia. As I wrote I remembered events. Conversations. Like the traditional father-son-pre-spanking-admonishment: “You’ll remember this for a long time.” But the only thing that escaped me, and it still does, is why I was ever spanked. What crimes had I committed? What misdemeanors had I inflicted on my family? Had I played after school when I should have been at the piano practicing? I have tried, without even a glimmer of success, to unearth the sins of my childhood.. I have not tried hypnosis.

The point is not just about the awakening of memory by writing. It is also the writing that stimulates readers to respond and to kindle new ideas for me. My dear friend Adrienne responds to all my blog blatherings.. The last one, about failing to maintain my “Looking Forward” attitude and letting life simply sag into indifference, brought forth a torrent of advice.

Adrienne reminded me of something I always believed but seem to have utterly forgotten. It certainly didn’t get into “Don’t Be Blindsided by Retirement.” It is about identity. You become are what you “do” not what you “are.”

Forgive me if I seem to have a knack for revealing the obvious. Think about meeting people for the first time. Unless they know you by reputation, the first question will inevitably be: “And what do you do for a living.” Maybe it’s just an ice breaker. But there has to be more.

A dear friend, who died several years ago after amassing a fortune as an investment counselor and creator of mutual funds, had the ability to “corner” his subject. I used to watch him at cocktail parties. With an earnest look he would approach someone and start to pry into their lives. He did it with a kind of English public school insouciance, so no one seemed to take offence. Almost always it began with: “Tell me about yourself.” No matter how trivial the answer, he would always listen intently as if the words were pearls. Maybe he did it just to get the jump on people. If he spoke first and asked a disarming question, they’d be speechless at first, but he would own their attention from that point on.

He was a rarity. He was not someone who himself would divulge his inner self easily. It may be that what I saw as an amiable of attitude was merely a performance

Don’t know.

But perhaps my own problem,, which may reflect the dilemmas of many other people, is that I have allowed myself to be identified by “what” I was. It has been a trap. I find myself harking back to the things I did for a living, most of which were publicly visible; to my “celebrity” and the approval that went with it; to the pleasure of being in a position to make my opinions public; and to bask I suppose, in whatever notoriety I had.

So in this, another piece of self-indulgence, (to be followed by more) is simply a precautionary tale told to retirees and more than that, to those who are planning now.
You‘d better persuade yourself that you can’t simply go on “doing” what you always have done, and passing it off a “identity.” You have to stop clinging to your past successes and look for new challenges.

I’m trying.