The Oldest We’ve Ever Been
The Oldest We’ve Ever Been: Seven True Stories of Midlife Transitions contains essays gathered by Maud Lavin, from people of varied backgrounds, both men and women, who have made it to midlife. The writers, Allan deSouza, Calvin Forbes, William Davies King, Kim Larsen, Ellen McMahon, Peggy Shinner, and Maud Lavin together with Locke Bowman, not only talk about that part of their life but also things that have affected them as they’ve grown to middle age.
Excerpt from “Nothing Gained” by William Davies King:
I’ve read accounts of those people who one day just give away everything, purging themselves of material association. They report feeling liberated. It’s a Buddhist or Gnostic or Henry David Thoreau experience. I suppose the moment of my divorce might have been a good moment for me to do something like that. As I started into the garage, I did not like what I saw. During the twenty years in which I had lived with my wife, two decades of steady accumulation, I had found ways of inserting my collections carefully into the assemblage of our life together, mostly concealed. Removed to the garage, however, arranged in heaps, not carelessly but also not artfully, the things could be seen as symptoms of hoarding, which is a diagnosis, not a hobby. On that hot summer day, I took a moment to ask myself if my collecting could be a disease. Or could it be an art? I could not say, so I laboriously conveyed the cumbersummation of me to a new residence. It seems I had to keep the array in order to catch myself somewhere on the web.