A Writer's Day

The first thing Paul Lerner did in the morning was feel his right wrist. His doctor had diagnosed him with tendonitis there, told him to wear a brace when using his wrist, take an anti-inflammatory and rest it as much as he could. If it still hurt after three or four weeks he’d try a cortisone shot.  .Paul pressed down on the usual spot on the left side of his wrist. Ouch! The pain was still there.

A wrist problem wasn’t good for anyone, but it was especially bad for someone like Paul, who was a writer. He thought he could call himself a writer at any rate as in the 15 years since he’d retired he’d written overt 400 pieces for local newspapers, for which, he estimated, he’d been paid about $20,000. Moreover, one of the papers had given him a business card which said “Writer.”

At age 76, he now wrote two columns for the monthly newspaper that went to his Northern California retirement community, $100 per month. That he considered his journalistic writing. He also wrote short stories for online magazines. Almost 200 of these had been published and he’d self-published three books of them, of which he’d sold maybe 50 to his fellow retirees. He’d resigned himself to never being a best-selling author.  

At breakfast, Paul’s wife Sally asked him how his wrist felt. “About the same..”

“Are you going to play pool this morning?”

There was a pool room with four tables in The Lodge, the center of community activities. Until he reached the age of 75, Paul had played tennis three or four times a week, then, because his knees had given out, he’d started playing pool with some other old tennis players. The game was much easier on the knees and he figured he could play as long as he could get up to the table. “No, better not. I don’t want to make it worse.. I might go to the library. Do you have anything on this morning?

“An Art Club meeting. We’re almost out of milk. Do you think you could go to the store and get some?”

“I’ll go to Safeway after the library. Anything else?”

“Look at my list.” Sally always had a list, posted on the fridge.

“All right.” After breakfast, Paul took his second cup of coffee to their enclosed patio, or sunroom, as they sometimes called it, and did the daily crossword puzzle while occasionally glancing out to see if any birds were at their bird feeder. Their two cats, Shandyman and Bun-bun, as usual followed him out to the patio.  Bun-bun, a soft mostly black cat jumped up to the back of Paul’s chair and then onto the bookcase behind it, his favored spot. Shandyman, a big black-and-white cat jumped up on the table, from where he could keep an eye out on any activity in the back yard.  While doing the puzzle, Paul put his wrist brace on.Maybe he shouldn’t be doing the puzzle, but it was habitual, something he did every morning.

After finishing the puzzle,  Paul checked his computer. It was an old one so he turned it on in the morning before breakfast, then looked at it later, by which time it had managed to get itself booted up.  The computer was something like himself, Paul often thought; it took longer and longer to get started. Paul checked his e-mails, but no, nothing of interest. He had three of his short stories out, all to online magazines where he’d published before,  and was waiting to hear from the editors about them.  It was strange that, after all these years of writing, he still was anxious about such things.
 
  *** 

The library, which had opened just the year before, was only a few minutes’ drive from the retirement community. Paul returned his books (he always had some out), looked at the new book section (nothing much there), then browsed in the “literary” section. He found a large book on the “Art of the Personal Essay” and decided to take it out. He had an idea in the back of his mind that eventually he’d like to write some essays on subjects he’d thought about on and off through his life.. He already had some titles:  “On Growing Old,” “On Writing” and “On Reading” and an overall title “Last Words.” Paul tried to always have some project for the next year or two. He thought it a good idea to have a some kind of goal ahead of him. He also felt, although he knew it was sheer suspicion, that having a goal might mean he’d still be around to try achieving it.
 
He’d written a story in which a writer like himself talks Death into letting him live until he’s sold 50 copies of his self-published book, thinking he’d never make it. Then the writer’s wife tells him an old college friend of hers is ordering enough copies to break the 50 mark.  The writer then decides to tell Death his real goal was 100..

From the library, he drove a few minutes to the local Safeway.  Paul didn’t mind shopping; it gave him a chance to pick up items that Sally might not get.. He put the milk in his cart, then bought a loaf of the crusty bread he liked, then a carton of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, then he browsed around as he’d done in the library. He bought some strawberries, one box free, and a box of blueberries, supposed to be the world’s most nutritious food, a box of mints on sale, then, remembering they were low,  two boxes of kitty litter. The checkout girl knew him by now and, as he was still wearing the brace, asked about his wrist.

“My doctor said it’s tendonitis.”

“I had that once. I think I got a cortisone shot.”

“I may have to get one, too.”

The checkout girl’s name was Annette. She wasn’t exactly pretty but she was buxom and liked to wear low-cut blouses, as she was doing today.  Paul considered that seeing Annette at Safeway was a bonus to doing the shopping.  Annette asked if he needed any help going out to his car. Paul thought, he didn’t have that much stuff, and said he’d manage.

“All right. You take care now.”
 
In the parking lot Paul noticed a young woman in shorts bending over as she put her purchases in the trunk of her car. She offered a nice view. Paul stopped for a moment, this might be a story. An old geezer, like himself, who notices every pretty young women, and some not so pretty, as he goes about his daily business. In a way, it would be like Irwin Shaw’s classic short story, “Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” in which the hero notices the good-looking women as he and his girl friend, no, his wife, walk down Fifth Avenue in New York City. He’d make a note of it when he got home.  Maybe the story would say that men, no matter what their age. would always look at girls.. .

 ***

After lunch, Paul checked his e-mail again. Nothing about any of the three stories he’d sent out. No other e-mails of interest. The usual spam, which as usual he deleted. While he was at the computer, he looked at the story he was currently writing, derived from an incident when he was going to college. Was he recalling things further  back as he aged? Maybe.  He was writing the story in little scenes so he could do it one scene at a time without his wrist hurting too much. He read what he written so far and made some changes. As the next scene formed itself in his mind he typed a few sentences, then his wrist really began to hurt and he realized he didn’t have the brace on.

He looked on the lamp table next to the chair where he’d had his lunch, but it wasn’t there. He asked Sally if she’d seen it. She told him to check the patio. He did; not there. Then he remembered; after lunch, he’d taken off the brace when he washed his hands. He looked in the bathroom and there it was. This wasn’t the first time he’d gone looking for the brace. It might be a good subject for an “Observations” column, objects that went missing. He was always looking for his glasses and he was sure many other residents in their retirement community did the same. He made a note for future reference.

  ***

Paul sat in his living room chair and looked through the book on personal essays he’d taken out from the library that morning. He found the Introduction interesting. A recurrent theme in personal essays was comparing the present with the past, and always finding the past better. He’d written quite a few “Observations” using that theme and of course most senior citizens would agree. He read through an essay by Montaigne, the father of the personal essay, and thought that next time he’d look for a book of Montaigne’s essays in the library. Then he remembered he had a copy of “Summing Up” by Somerset Maugham, like Irwin Shaw, one of his favorite writers. He recalled that Maugham had written about trying to gather his thoughts about things he’d been interested in throughout his life.

He found the book and looked through the first few pages.  Sure enough, Maugham had written:  “In this book I am going to try to sort out my thoughts on the subjects that have chiefly interested me during the course of my life …It has seemed to me that if I set them down in some sort of order I should see for myself more distinctly what they really were and so might get some kind of coherence into them.” Further on, he wrote:  “An occasional glance at the obituary column of the Times has suggested to me that the sixties are very unhealthy; I have long thought that it would exasperate me to die before I had written this book and so it seemed to me that I had better set about it at once.” Paul felt the same way, and he was in his seventies.  He put a bookmark in that page, thinking that he could quote what Maugham said as a way of leading up to his essays, whenever he wrote them.

  ***

Paul and Sally were going to dinner with some friends at the restaurant in the Lodge. It was a Thursday night and it had a two for $20 special, very popular with the senior citizens. The restaurant was crowded but Sally had made reservations.  The two couples they ate with had both lived in San Francisco at about the same time, in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, as Paul and Sally had.  The story Paul was writing, in small scenes, was set in San Francisco at that time and had come about when he’d seen an obituary in the paper about someone he’d known then, who’d become a fairly well-known sports writer. (Like Maugham, he looked at obituaries, only not occasionally, almost every day.)

The conversation was mostly about restaurants and other places they’d been to back in their San Francisco days.  Someone mentioned the Buena Vista, a well-known watering hole, where supposedly Irish coffee was invented.  Paul remembered something that had happened there he hadn’t thought of in years. The girl he was going with at the time had, for some reason, gone up to the bar. When she came back she said that, and she named one of the San Francisco Forty-niner football players, had tried to pick her up. Paul was about to tell the others about this, but then, as the girl hadn’t been Sally, he thought better of it. A story there? Maybe; he’d file that one away.

When they returned home, they watched  television,  Bun-bun sitting on the footrest of Sally’s chair and Shandyman on the back of Paul’s, until it was time to go to bed.Paul changed into his pajamas. “Do you know,” he remarked to Sally, “nobody said anything about my wrist brace.  The checkout girl at Safeway noticed it and asked me about it. ”

“Maybe they thought you didn’t want them to mention it.”

“No, I don’t think they even noticed it.  Remember when I had that basil cell removed and had a big bandage on my head. Nobody here noticed that either.”

“You could be right.”

“I am.” A possible subject for an “Observations” column,  senior citizens not seeing  things right in front of them. Failing eyesight?  Maybe. More likely, too self-absorbed to notice anything about other people.  He’d think about it.

Before getting into bed, he took one last look at his computer and there was an e-mail from one of his editors; Paul’s story would be in the next issue of the editor’s online magazine.  Paul knew it was no big deal; still, he felt gratified at this. In bed, he kissed Sally good night. He reviewed the events of the day. A title for the story about an old guy who noticed all the pretty girls came to him, “Impure Thoughts.”  He tried to think of other objects that went missing. His wallet, his keys, the TV remote …His mind drifted and he was asleep..