If I could do it all over again
I have been paging through a book I first read many years ago when I was in college, a collection of poems by Denise Levertov called O Taste and See. It is a New Directions paperback (for I mean the actual book, now nearly half a century old).
I bought it in the long-vanished Arcade Bookstore, which was located in the ground floor of the Commercial Trust Building (also long-gone) on 15th Street between Market and Chestnut. I read it on the El on my way home (I didn’t live on campus; I commuted, which was cheaper).
I can still remember being curled up in one of the corner seats on the way to the Bridge Street Terminal and coming upon one poem in particular that clutched the short hairs of my soul.
It’s called “The Old Adam” and tells of an “old man who has failed his memory … who thought the dollar was sweet and / couldn’t make a buck,” and who has come to the end of his days asking
… what it’s too late to ask:
‘Where is my life? Where is my life?
What have I done with my life?’
I remember looking up and staring out the window and thinking to myself, “I sure as hell don’t want to end up like that.”
Of course, I realize now that we all end up like that, at least those of us with an introspective bent. I don’t mean that we all end up thinking we’ve wasted our lives, but we are all likely to weigh ourselves in the balance and, if we are at all honest, find ourselves — to some degree at least — wanting. After all, nobody bats a thousand and a mere three out of 10 puts you at the top of the lineup.
In short, you start out wondering what life is all about, and end up wondering what it’s all added up to.
The funny thing is, I am not so sure I could have made more of my life even if I had tried. I suspect I would have simply made something different of it. And, for two reasons, I can’t regret not having done that: First, I am not altogether displeased with how my life has turned out, and second, I have no way of knowing if a different life would have proved better than the one I have lived.
No, if I have any regrets — and I’m not really given to such, or to nostalgia — they would have to do with not making the most of things, of taking for granted too many people who did so much for me and too many things that gave me joy.
Actually, though, now that I think about it, as I edge nearer the Biblical age, what bothers me most is not what I could have done or didn’t do, but that I necessarily have comparatively little time left in which to do anything. Every walk I take has a valedictory quality to it. Mothers with their children seem so young and I realize how young I must have seemed years ago to those whose age I have reached.
Recently I was walking down a stretch of 13th Street in Center City and I noticed how upscale all the shops and cafes and restaurants had become. A closed-up dive was the only remnant of the charming seediness that distinguished the area when I first got to know it in college. I suddenly became cognizant of all the changes that had accrued over the years and I realized I no longer quite recognized my native city. The factories that flourished when I was a kid are now either empty or have been turned into condos. Even the South Philly neighborhood I live in now is becoming gentrified.
A few minutes ago, I took a break from writing this column to do a turn on the patio. While I was there I did some weeding in one of the flower beds. One of the earliest clear memories I have is of helping my mother in the garden when I was about 4, and to this day yard work is among the most satisfying activities I can think of.
I can understand why Henry Miller wrote, late in life, that if he had it to do over again he would be a gardener.
So might I.
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Very nice, Frank. Remember, Voltaire’s Candide (the world weary cynic who had earned his perspective) would be proud of anyone’s ambition simply to tend the garden, either metaphorical or otherwise.
You’ve been a gardener all along. Not many people notice the wildflowers, know their names, or point them out to others as if introducing an old friend. Nor can I think of anyone who could keep a blooming hibiscus alive indoors for two score years.
That is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me.
“Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.”
–Albert Einstein
As long as you are satisfied with your life, as long as you have no regrets, why worry about where your life has led you? Be content that you at least had the chance to live it.