Excerpt
Warren Bennis is among the most insightful students and teachers of organizational dynamics. His offspring also seem to have good sense. When he was provost of the University of Buffalo, he told of a remark made by his six year old daughter. Frequently he was required to entertain dignitaries and visitors to the university at receptions in his campus home. On many evenings they entertained lavishly. Once when he and his wife were alone with the child, they asked what she would like to be when she grew up. Not surprisingly she replied, I would like to be a guest. She chose well. I know. I have been one all of my life. I am satisfied with my gravestone: Not The Brightest Nor The Best But Forever The Guest.
The great American novel will have to wait. I decided to write the memoir first. The choice was easy. The novel would be overly melodramatic and would be criticized for poor character development and unconvincing dialogue. The memoir, however, is a light romantic comedy much easier to pull off. The style is intended to be what my mother preferred in a motion picture. If it was to entertain, for Genevieve, it had to be light and fluffy.
I could have waited but long range planning is risky at my age. In the matter of later life memoirs, I take heart from the story of one of my favorite humorists, Art Buchwald, who was barely holding on in his eighty-first year. Suffering from kidney failure, he lost a leg, declined dialysis and had gone to a hospice to die. But in mid-2006 he felt a resurgence of strength and resumed working on a memoir he wanted to finish before departure. We all do. It was published two months before his death. When people in our age group mention that they are 'making arrangements', they are not referring to next week's dinner plans but to this life's exit plans. The title of Art Buchwald's memoir is Too Soon to Say Goodbye, most appropriate. The one I hope you are about to read is Life as A Guest: Deo Gratias. It won out over the original working title, From Freckles to Liver Spots.
I attended a few of Art's presentations years ago, including one to which he invited me during a chance encounter in the men's room at a Princeton New Jersey conference center. Having heard him speak at a local college a few weeks earlier and feeling I knew him, I asked what he was doing in Princeton. He said he was giving a presentation to a business group, Goldman Sachs, and invited me to listen in. As we went up the stairs, with that patented Buchwald lisp, he said, Wait, not Goldman Sachs, it's Salomon Brothers. He paused, turned and confided, Same difference.
But how are the labors of all these dedicated raconteurs like myself to be judged? Initially, we must grant that one is a legitimate audience. How true. I have to tell my story, if only to myself, says the memoirist. In other words, there is more than a tad of self-absorption in the average memoir author like this one. Intentionally or unwittingly, most of them may be writing for that select and most important readership of one, but their work may still be socially beneficial. First, it keeps them off the streets and out of the pool halls. Most pale, struggling scribes favor writer's block over sun block. Secondly, it produces economic benefits for the thriving memoir book business, commercial firms like Staples, Office Depot, Epson and the booming author-at-home, publish-on-demand and self-publishing trades.
Memoir writing is also a formidable mental hygiene program for the would-be author if not always for the reader. In the exhilarating, soul purging struggle to please editor, publisher and self, he or she can be miraculously unburdened of all those accumulated life hang-ups without the expense and distractions of extended therapy. They instinctively know the truth of the axiom, Anyone who would go to a psychiatrist ought to have his or her head examined. Facing tight deadlines, print journalists often struggle. One premier twentieth century writer of the typewriter era, Walter Red Smith said, The natural habitat of the tongue is the left cheek. He might have added that the natural habitat of the writer's quill is poised but motionless. In fact, he did utter that sentiment in the words, There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
This book is intended to be long on retrospection and short on introspection. It is better that others be my inspectors. The opinions it contains are rendered with charity and respect for those of others. I hope the personal values it expresses are borne out by my own behavior. The overriding reflection that inspired this writing is the compelling obligation to respect this and every life, to be thankful to God for the gifts of life, love and faith and for the loved ones and friends with whom it has been shared in both good and difficult times. Doing so, or striving to, involve the virtue of gratitude, derived from the supreme virtue of love.
I am grateful for so many life partners in a life lavishly blessed. I have known the compassionate presence of God and His earthly angels are many. My parents and devoted aunts who raised me, my younger brother, Gerry, who was my special teacher, my wonderful bride, Betty, who has given me my singular honor in fifty seven years of marriage. Our five children and their families along with so many friends have been there always when I most needed them and sometimes, I hope, when they needed me. Or, in the words of Maureen Stapleton's never to be surpassed 1982 twelve word Oscar acceptance speech, "I want to thank everyone I ever met in my entire life."
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