Hildegarde

Or, you know, something.

Or maybe not.

I’ve got to say that the range of comments interested me yesterday.

I’m not much interested in plastic surgery or in crones, to tell you the truth.  I’ve been in and out of academia long enough to have encountered the whole academic feminist crone thing, and the word always sounds to me not just like a term of “old woman,” but as a term for “really ugly old woman who doesn’t know how to buy wart remover at CVS.”

One of the interesting things about Marple is that she gives a whole new dimension to the idea of the “little old lady.”  She’s certainly little, and she’s certainly old, but she’s not halt and shaky, she’s got a good mind and she has…ah…interests.

Okay, in real life, if you have those interests, you tend to get arrested for interfering with a police investigation.  But you know what I mean.

As for the plastic surgery–I’m from the Connecticut Gold Coast.  We’ve got plenty of victims of plastic surgery out here.  It’s not as high a percentage as they have in LA, I’m sure, but high-level bankers and partners in Goldman, Sachs also feel they have something to lose if they don’t look young.  If they’re women, they may be right.  I have a cousin who will not let her hair go grey until after she retires, because she’s sure grey hair would compromise her at work.

And she’s an engineer.

But I do the two things you can do these days that are neither simple shift work–as Kenny Chesney put it–nor crazy about keeping you young.  It almost helps for writers of traditional mysteries to be little old ladies.

Or at least it helps with some kind of audiences.

So I do have some examples of how to be as I get older.  Unfortunately, none of them are personal.  I know/knew lots of older men whom I admired (or admire, if they’re still with us).  The women around me were mostly cautionary tales of one sort or another.

Either that, or they rejected some part of what I consider important.

So, I’ve got Marple–and Gertrude Stein is good, I think.  She was vigorous to the end.  She had a good mind and good friends and work. 

Goldman, though–really no.  A few years ago, I read her autobiography, both volumes, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so appalled in my life.  The woman was a sociopath on more levels than one.  And if there’s one thing I hope I’ve learned before I get to be sixty, it’s that it’s really not morally okay to assassinate people for the cause. 

And that, if your assassination doesn’t take, it’s really not oppression when they put you in jail for several years for attempted murder.

Okay, that was her lover, Alexander what’s his name, but it was her defense of him that bothered me. 

P.D. James is a good example, I think.  She’s got to be eighty, put out a very good novel ( The Private Patient) just a little while ago, seems to have people around her.

Hell, I thought she was a role model all the way along.  She didn’t have her first novel published until she was forty and didn’t have her first best seller until she was sixty. 

As for diminished expectations–eh.  I don’t think I want my expectations to diminish so much as I want them to change.  I don’t know if that makes very much sense. 

In a way, it goes back to the plastic surgery.  The problem with that, for me, is the spectacle of women who want to chase boys and orgasms well past the time when chasing either makes any sense. 

There isn’t anything wrong with orgasms, of course, and really good looking young men are always fun no matter what age you’re ate–but these days I want to feed them, not go to bed with them, and both the boys and the orgasms seem to me to be largely peripheral to the central issues of my life.

And that is, I think, the way it should be.  For at least some of the time between fifteen and fifty, sex is the most important thing in our lives because, biologically, it’s the most important thing in our lives.  The biological imperative is there to make sure the species carries on.

But I’ve had my last child, and I wouldn’t opt for one of those implant things if you paid me.  Sex is nice, on occassion, but it’s definitely a side issue.  There are other things to do in the world.

And I’ve got some idea of what those things are.

I’d like to start another series–not to give up Gregor, but to do another one.  It’s been over twenty years since I wrote anything else, at least in book length, but Cavanaugh Street.

I’d like to have the guts to actually learn to play the harpsichord, instead of just sitting around being afraid to try to learn to play the harpsichord, since I’m not exactly talented musically. 

I’d like to figure out how I feel about teaching.  Or, specifically, the kind of teaching I’ve been doing in the program I sometimes talk about here.

When I went into it–and it’s been over ten years now–I thought I knew what was going on in the populations my program serves.  I thought the people in those populations were largely without opportunities (true), that they’d gone to schools where the teachers were bad (true) and the curricula limited (true).

I thought it was just a matter of presenting them with a good teacher with first-class credentials and they’d get right down to it, because the only issue was giving them a chance.

It’s been a decade and I do know, now, that that last thing is not true. 

And some of what I’m seeing is definitely a matter of people not being given opportunities, or, worse, being abused and neglected as children.  I’ve had students who were abandoned in the street and students who were turned out at the age of eleven by crack-addicted mothers.  I know Fagin and Sikes were not characters Charles Dickens just made up.

But there’s something else going on here, and that I don’t entirely understand.  And I have a feeling that until we do understand it, and until we report it honestly and then face it, we’re never really going to improve the possibilities for kids who are born into this sort of thing.

And the answer may be that we can’t improve the possibilities, no matter what we do, except for the isolated kid here and there. 

That’s a long and philosophical discussion that I should take on sometime, except that I haven’t really straightened out what I think of it.  So one of the things I would like to do, getting older, is to figure all that out.

But I don’t want to do it on Barsoom.

I’m not much interested in cocktail parties, either, but I don’t see what point the characteries in fantasy or the other-world kind of science fiction would have for me, in this particular case.

I’m not going to live in Barsoom (on Barsoom?  I don’t actually know what that is) any more than I’m going to go to cocktail parties.

Do people still give them?

I’m going to go put on some Gustav Leonhardt.