STAGE FOUR — A ROOM OF MY OWN

I’ve been taking stock the last few weeks. I just realized that was the exact term: taking stock.

It all started when I decided to have the outside of the house painted and repaired, and to paint and repair the inside myself. This time, I also decided to start painting the interior with what I loosely call “my studio”—a tiny room of approximately eight feet by six feet, where I spend a very large portion of my life.

Over the three decades that we’ve lived here, my studio has most often been pushed to the end of the line on the To Do List. So, by the time I decided it was time to give it priority, it had become a sort of third world corner of the house, so to speak, a slummy place where way too many things with no particular utility were stored, where the bookcases were littered with all sorts of things that had no business being there, where two large storage tubs and a lidded wicker basket were heavy-laden with god-knew-what, because nobody (meaning me) had sorted through them for at least twenty years, and where every manner of obsolete hard and software lurked in the corners, just in case some use might eventually be found for them. 

A doorway but no door

Be that as it may, although I suffer from classic claustrophobia—they once tried to roll me into a coffin-like tunnel and run an MRI on me, but I raised such holy hell that they had to pull me out and send me to another facility that had a different sort of scanner—I’ve never thought of my studio as cramped. For one thing, it has a doorway, but no door, so I’m in contact with the rest of the house. My wife coming and going, our six cats chasing each other up and down the stairs (oh, by the way, the studio is upstairs), the sounds and smells of meals cooking, the chug and whir of the washing machine, or the sound of music or the TV when either happens to be on. And then too, practically one entire end of the room (all six feet of it) is windows: two, a fixed pane and a hinged window that opens in. They look onto the great outdoors—our unruly broom sedge and towering centenarian beeches, as well as the wooded side of a tall crag. As I work I only have to turn my head to look out and see the green and sun of summer, the blooming colors of spring, the golden tinges of autumn and the glistening rain and blankets of snow in winter.

The view

Then too, since it’s the place where I do my writing, it’s also a creative space, a “room of my own” as Virginia Woolf might have said. And as such, it seems way bigger. Boundless, in fact. It’s where all my thoughts and memories come to the fore. Never mind that I put it on like a proverbial overcoat when I sit down at my desk. It’s as big as my mind is willing to make it.

But for many years, it was also the “salt mine” I went to every morning and often stayed long into the night, cranking out millions of words of translation, writing and editing for a variety of clients in several different countries. It was the scene of all-nighters and abject exhaustion. The terrain of my professional ambitions. But it was also the headquarters for a one-man business that paid bills, put food on the table and generated life savings. So while it was often a place where I felt if I had to spend one more minute in it, I might lose my mind and burn it down, it was also a space to which I was grateful for the opportunity to make a living doing what I knew how to do best.

My intimate relationship with this little room, where I’m sitting at my desk writing at this very moment, is also enhanced by the fact that, in one way or another, I’m the creator of practically everything in it. The main two-inch thick, thirty-inch wide, sixty-three-inch long varnished desktop, attached to the wall at one end and resting on a tongue and groove support at the other. A marine plywood side desk under the window. The bookshelves above my desk and corner storage shelves at my back. The closet that runs from those shelves to the other end of the room. The varnished pine sill beneath the windows. Even the walls of the room itself, made of insulated twelve-millimeter plywood clad with white pine tongue and groove. They are all my own handiwork. Perhaps not beautiful, but utilitarian and indestructibly strong.

A tight reference library that accompanied
 me through decades of translation
and reseach.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember building all this stuff. But paying attention to it, painting and varnishing it, working under and over it, has gotten me back in touch with it and given me a glimpse into the past when I enthusiastically put this little corner of mine together after hauling out the ragtag jumble of tables, sawhorses and random lamps that originally made up my workspace when we first moved in.

But the real stock-taking began when I started digging into decades of papers, diskettes, magazines and documentation that had accumulated to the point of squalid overcrowding and unhealthy mildew. Not normally a hoarder, when it came to work, I suddenly realized, I had an intrinsic preoccupation with throwing anything out for fear of “needing it someday”—in case of repeated work, future reference, possible lawsuits, or simply a client’s request for something he or she had misplaced. And in Argentina, where bureaucracy is utterly stultifying, this care in keeping personal records also reached ridiculous proportions.

Paper trails from international court cases I translated in the nineteen-nineties and at the turn of the century. Background materials and hard copies of books long in print that I’d ghosted and/or translated ten or twenty years ago. Background data for articles long-since written and published in international periodicals, myriad notebooks for projects completed when I was still in my forties and fifties. Paper road atlases from the turn of the twenty-first century (just yesterday to my mind but already a quarter-century in the past). Reams upon reams of hardcopy that there was no conceivable reason to hang onto. All of these things have now been piled into boxes and placed where they belong, with the kindling with which we’ll start our morning wood fire in this and future winters to come.

Corner shelves cleared for a facelift.

Computer discs! I heaved a sigh of relief that, at least, I was no longer the owner of any 7-inch floppy discs. But 3.5-inch computer discs? Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Kept as backup until they were obsolete, but still here. What to do? Could I, in good conscience, just bag them up and heave them into the neighborhood recycle bin? The answer was “no”.

For one thing, I had to find out what was on them, since a small portion of them held, not work for hire, but my own creative writing, some of it forgotten fiction and non-fiction that might perhaps be worthwhile having a second look at. These I would sort out and set aside to take to Gonzalo, my computer genius, and have him rescue them and place them on a pen-drive for future reference.

For another thing, however, I had to consider the privacy of the many clients I’d served over the past thirty years. Everything I’d done was copyrighted material for magazines, reports for government agencies, procedures and testimonies for the courts, international litigation, safety and procedural manuals for nuclear projects, confidential reports from investment banks, insurance and oil company studies, environmental impact reports, and the personal stories and data of people for whom I’d been a biographical ghostwriter. For many of these jobs, I’d signed non-disclosure agreements, even one for the translation and re-writing of scripts for an eight-chapter Hollywood miniseries and catalogues for the Argentine National Museum of Fine Arts.

Only one thing to do: Go through each and every diskette, reading the labels and either placing them in a tiny pile of files to be downloaded onto pen-drives, or breaking them physically to render them useless and tossing them into a large black garbage bag—which then became two large black garbage bags full to the brim with the remnants of broken discs.

Bookcase now free of extraneous items
and in alphabetical order by author.

Then there were the thirty years of personal records: tax records for Argentina and the US, international banking records, old investment papers, personal and business emails, transactions for properties long-since sold to others, documentation for vehicles I no longer owned, evidential data for my Argentine Social Security claims (despite the fact that I’ve been drawing retirement for the past seven years and copies of all of this evidence were presented at the time), pictures of people whose names and relationships to me I no longer recalled, copies of newspaper front pages I’d designed in the seventies, pocket notebooks where I’d jotted down data no longer relevant to anything, a copy of Internet for Dummies for the early nineties, a copy of Useful Computer Terms from the eighties, step-by-step hardcopy instructions for How to Install Windows ’98… You get the picture.

Pre-USB cords and computer connections, a spare keyboard for a nineteen-nineties Compaq laptop, old console computer keyboards, computer transformers of every vintage, two and three-button pre-optic mice, and other devices whose purpose I no longer recalled. I took all of these to my computer guy along with the discs I would ask him to download to drives.

“I brought this stuff along in case any of it is of any use to you,” I said.

One look into the bag and Gonzalo whistled low. Smiling into the bag, he said, “Wow, this stuff is like to start a computer museum with.” I watched as, one by one, he hurled the artifacts into the trash, except for a lone transformer, which he turned over in his hand like an archeological find and, shrugging, said, “Well, I might be able to use this one for something.”

But I got to reflecting that little or nothing of any of this transformation of my studio had anything to do with the physical clean-up of a room. It was, instead, mental and spiritual, all about whisking away a three-decade accumulation of cobwebs and mental refuse. About refurbishing my mind and soul. About having, as Hemmingway once described, “a clean, well-lighted place” in which to conduct my creative endeavors for the rest of my life.

It was also about Stage Four.

I’ve come to think of my time here—I mean here on planet Earth, not here in Patagonia—as four stages. In fact, practically four separate lives. Perhaps these separations or chapters in a lifetime become clearer to an expatriate than they do to some other people who never leave home. I don’t know. But my life has been clearly divided into episodes. My childhood and adolescent years in Ohio. My youth traveling in the US and Europe with the Army and then continuing my travels to South America, where, after several random adventures, I initiated my life-long career as a journalist and writer. My middle age and older years in which I was striving to build and maintain a career and a name for myself. And now, Stage Four.

Reading back over the previous paragraph, I realize it all sounds very clear-cut. It’s not. After young childhood, I immediately wanted to “be big”. In the summer between my twelfth and thirteenth years, Grandma Alice, Whitie’s mother, handed me an old Gillette safety razor and told me I might want to think about starting to shave. It was true. There was a sparse blond fuzz growing on my cheeks and upper lip and chin. Still ignorable except in strong sunlight, but definitely a presence. I was kind of embarrassed at first, but then grateful to her. She, at least, had realized I was growing up. But then again, having raised four boys herself, how wouldn’t she notice? She knew all the signs of male adolescence.

She also gave me my first pack of Gillette Blue Blades, and that same evening, I had my first shave. As an afterthought, however, I decided not to shave my upper lip. It was, as I say, summertime, the perfect time to see if I could grow a mustache.

A week in, Reba Mae said, “You smell nice. Is that aftershave?”

“Skin Bracer.”

“You’re shaving?”

I nodded.

“Where’d you get the razor?”

“Grandma Alice.”

“Figures,” she muttered under her breath as she continued preparing supper.

A few more days passed before Whitie said, “What’s that piece of toilet paper stuck to your chin. You shavin’?”

I nodded.

“Well, you missed a spot on your lip there.”

“No,” I said, “I’m growing a mustache.”

“Y’are, huh,” he said and grinned. “Well, good luck with that.”

When my Uncle Ken saw me, he wryly said, “Hey, Danny, I think your lip’s dirty. Better go wash up.”

Eventually, I found an old discarded mascara case of my mother’s. It still had the little brush and a small amount of black mascara in it. I figured that, perhaps, with the slightest of touch-ups, I could make the incipient growth on my lip more visible. I shaved the light fuzz down to a shape more or less imitating the pencil-mustaches of actors like Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks, and then, ever so lightly, touched it up with the mascara. Pleased with the result I was sure that I looked like a grown man now.

Reba Mae said, “I sure hope you haven’t been into my mascara.”

“Mascara?” I said, my face reddening. Oh this? No, it’s just turning darker is all.”

“Right, uh-huh.”

Uncle Ken asked if I was still going around with a dirty lip. But my mother’s mother, Grandma Myrt, asked Grandpa Vern if he’d noticed I was growing a mustache already. He said, no, he hadn’t. But he couldn’t think of a young man who’d look nicer with one. I really appreciated that. And it was uncommon, since Vern wasn’t the complimentary type. He usually warned one not to “go around lookin’ like Raggedy-Assed Bill,” or would tell you that the trousers you were outgrowing looked “like you're expectin’ high water.” Thanks to Grandma Myrt, his own rural work-clothes were always impeccably clean and with creases rigidly ironed.

My 1960s persona, age eighteen.

But that facial hair episode was short-lived and I didn’t grow another mustache until the summer after my junior year, when it came in full, if still quite blond. That was the year I started playing nightclub gigs with a jazz trio and, at least until I had to return to high school at summer’s end, the “stash” helped me maintain the illusion of being older than my years, which I reinforced with the clothes I wore—suits, sport coats and gabardine slacks, ties, cufflinks, topcoats, wing-tipped shoes and snap-brimmed hats.

Suffice it to say that I’ve spent half my life trying to look older and the other half trying to look younger. I really didn’t get comfortable with who I was until I was a very mature man. In fact, I never came into a writing or even personal style that I could really call “my own” until I was nearing fifty. Until then, I was always striving to be more than anyone ever expected me to be. And it was only from then on that the only person I felt it was worthwhile surprising was myself.

That’s the attitude with which I’ve come to Stage Four. When does Stage Four happen? Hard to say. Probably different for everyone. But it’s when you realize that something has quite apparently ended and something else has clearly begun.

The Rolling 'Bones' still going strong

Now, for some folks, admitting you’ve reached Stage Four is like admitting your life is over. But I don’t see it that way, and neither do the most creative people I’ve known, or a lot of others I haven’t known. Mick Jagger is still rockin’ on with what’s left of the Rolling ‘Bones’ (Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts recently played his last gig), as are Graham Nash, John Fogerty, Pete Townshend, Bob Seger, Eric Clapton, Gladys Knight, Boz Scaggs and Roger Waters, among a raft of other septuagenarians, who continue to pack the venues where they perform. Writers still going strong in their seventies include such famous names as Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Sue Grafton, Isabel Allende and Stephen King, among many others. And Joyce Carole Oates, who published her first novel in 1963, last year published her latest one, Babysitter, at the age of eighty-four, and she continues to work.

I guess my point is that age is inexorable, but being “elderly” isn’t. I’ve known a handful of people who weren’t elderly at ninety. I’ve also known some who were elderly in their sixties. Health, of course, is a factor. I’m not denying that. But all things being equal, it’s all about attitude and purpose. A hobby, a profession, a craft, a skill, a passionate interest, a December love affair, or just a commitment to enjoying life to the fullest, they are all the key to aging not merely with dignity, but also with continuing joie de vivre.

Anyway, my studio is now neat, clean, uncluttered and, finally, the place where I will no longer be doing “other people’s work.” Only my own, the ideas and writing that have long been my passion, the stories I’ve longed to tell “someday”, the place where I can give free rein to a world of my own. The cobwebs and extraneous distractions have been swept from my workspace and from my mind and soul. It’s a brand new room, a brand new day, a brand new mindset, and a brand new life, in which, for as long as it lasts, I have never been freer.