Memoir, from just outside the box

The Invisible Man

Note: I have delivered a “Memoir” post every Tuesday for over three years. If you missed anything, you can follow the menu back to the beginning, “Yellowstone.” Most of you know that I have been a letter writer since I was seven years old. Over the last seventy years, I have inspired many others to embrace the lost art of letter-writing. At “Memoir,” occasionally I have stepped aside and featured the voice of one of my pen pals…

WDL / 1967

SUMMER 2024

Today, while working out at Planet Fitness, I remembered again that, at 76, I am invisible. It is always stunning to realize that so much is over.

In 1993, I was newly separated. I went for a drink with another newly separated friend. We went to a hip area of Cincinnati, Over-The-Rhine, and a popular new night spot, Neon's. The crowded place was populated by twenty-somethings. Tom and I went completely unnoticed. I was 45 and I still looked pretty good. So did my friend, Tom, who was often mistaken for Paul Newman. Except for our waitress, no one at Neon’s gave us the time of day.

In 2003, I was in Vail doing an ad sales gig. I learned that the North Mississippi Allstars would be performing at a huge bar there. I love those guys, a blues-rock band. I went, even though they weren't coming on until 10:30 PM, which meant I wouldn't get my 8 hours of sleep. The place was filled with college guys with baseball hats worn backwards and dozens of beautiful blonde coeds. There wasn't anyone in the place over 35. I was now 56 and officially invisible. I stayed for the music, sitting in the back, loving that the dance floor was on giant springs and the kiddies were rocking the place up and down.

In a recent blog post, my friend David Buckner, who lives a block from Berkeley, and who's a pro photographer and an ex-English teacher, brought up an incident he experienced at 24-Hour Fitness.

"The New Normal" was about the ever-increasing regularity of witnessing or being at the ass-end of rude and rotten behavior. On a crowded morning, the treadmills were packed and he had the displeasure of being next to a thirty-something male who was engaged in a Facetime conversation on his cell phone, volume up all the way. David was wearing noise-cancelling earbuds and trying to listen to a podcast, but heard every word of the conversation next to him. When David left, he told the man, "No one wants to hear your personal conversation. You should move to a more isolated treadmill if you're going to Facetime." The man dismissed him with just a few sharp words. "Shut up, old man." David said he walked away saying, "Asshole," and heard the man again say, "Shut up, old man."

David continued his blog with a commentary about our current politics, ending with a terrible flashback. In 1970, David was newly married to a Chinese American woman he met in the Peace Corps. They lived near Cincinnati, and one night they went to a Reds game. On the way home, he noticed his wife was crying and he asked why. A fan had pointed to her and muttered, "I killed me a bunch of them in Nam." More than fifty years later, white supremacists are more visible and more virulent than ever.

Recently, I subscribed to an A.I. site for its free trial. One of the exercises I gave to the site was to replicate an image I recalled during hypnosis with an Indian shaman. I had imagined a Gerber baby food jar… applesauce, of course… with the smiling baby, set in a field of wildflowers. The wildflowers were infested with many large spiders.

The image in my hypnotic trance was about innocence in a world of beauty and danger, a world of goodness and evil. The site I used couldn't violate trademarks. Gebber is close enough to Gerber to allow me to enjoy seeing the trance image with my eyes open. My sister said that A.I. needed to create a cuter baby.

I typed in "Donald Trump wearing a red tie down to his knees, being attacked by spiders." I know the A.I. image doesn't resemble Trump, but I love that his sycophants are cheering while they themselves are turning into spiders.

Double sevens feels like this one is a serious birthday, one that will cause deep introspection, a state of mind you permanently embraced during your six years in the small cabin on the Blackfoot River in Montana. Over the years, I've managed to avoid considering the birthday numbers as they grew larger. This birthday is different. So far, I don't like 77, although I prefer it to the darker alternative.

It feels as if the dust has settled on the over-the-top excitement that Harris and Walz have brought to the campaign season. I’m now pretty much focused on Trump’s and the Republicans’ prep for denying election results as well as the coming emergence from hibernation of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Q-Anon and all the other White Nationalists who flunked out of Anger Management class. I figure I should give some thought to post-election preparations. No matter who wins, it’s going to be ugly.

"Painted on one side of our Sunday school wall were the words, God is Love. We always assumed that these three words were spoken directly to the four of us in our family and had no reference to the world outside, which my brother and I soon discovered was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana." -Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It.