The last thing I want to do is complain about being old, but if there is one thing I am learning, it’s that life seems to take away as much as it gives anymore.
In the process, it almost seems as if the best days are when nothing big happs.
Just in the last few days, it’s a case of two up and two down.
My wfie has a medical condition that is one of those one-way streets. It gets worse but not better. Our marriage was the second for both of us, and it was almost something of a fairy tale story. We met in September 1992 and were married 51 days later. We were both 42 at the time and are now in our mid 70s.
I love Nicole more than I can say, and in our 14 years in Georgia, she has gone through some horrible health problems — a broken back, a perforated intestine that required a colostomy and maybe the scariest of all, a diagnosis of Lewy Body Dementia in 2014 that turned out to be wrong.
Now a variation on one of the three appears to be back, and it is truly heartbreaking.
At any rate, her condition has slipped enough that the other day we started having an in-home nurse for four hours a day. That’s the “up” in this, even though it is costing us a lot of money. Fortunately, we can afford it.
The plan now is that next summer we will move to Virginia and go into assisted living.
My prayer is that we will make it to then without any huge setbacks.
Memory care will be part of it, and that’s the last clue.
My week has been equally bizarre. Thanks to my own efforts and to my wonderful son-in-law Johnathan Roy, I have become an actual published author in my 70s. I worked for more than 40 years as a newspaper reporter and columnist and as a blogger. If you add up all the words I wrote on newsprint and computer screens, it probably gets into seven figures, but there is still something about holding a book you wrote and had published that is a wonderful feeling.
As much as I triede when I was younger, I could not make myself write full-length books. I got a very lucky break when my lifelong friend Bill Madden told me he had done a first draft of a comic novel about professional football. We worked together and wrote “The System” in 1982 and then put it aside for 40 years.
Don’t ask why.
But Johnathan read it, thought it was very funny and got it published for us.
The only feeling in my life comparable to holding this book in my hands the first time was in 1975 and 1992 when I said “I do.”
A year later I had another book published, this one I had written myself, and it was the one I said I could die happy if it came out. That was my coming of age novel, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the first draft of which came out in 1990.
I have a third book at the publisher right now that I hope will be out within a month or so. It’s unique of all my works in that it wasn’t written decades ago and then returned to. “Heart’s Desire” was created in the last five years or so.
Which brings us to this week. The first novel I ever wrote by myself was completed in 1989 and it was mediocre. I liked the premise. It was a long book with pedestrian prose, called “Sharing Her Dreams.”
I actually lost the manuscript in the mid 1990s and never found it again.
But about five years ago, I started revisiting the story, and after “Heart’s Desire” was finished, I got back to this story. I originally called it “Twice in a Lifetime,” and when I was about 80-90 percent of the way through it, I changed the name of the main female character from Kim to Amy and the title of the book to “Twice in Love With Amy.”
So the good news is I finished it this week.
The bad news?
I slipped on a wet spot in the bathroom and fell, apparently tearing ligaments in the left knee and breaking my big toe.
Oh well.