08/17/2026
This is the sort of stuff you get if you subscribe to my substack. Paid versions get a lot more of this than the free versions.
Hey All,
I’m a homebody. I hate being away from home. When I used to tour, I hated the travel, enjoyed the talks, enjoyed eating at local restaurants, enjoyed meeting up with friends, and hated being away from home. Normally I would add up the hours I would be away from home, and count them down.
This trip is the same way. I was thinking, before it started, that all things-good or bad-end. No matter what we do, fun or not fun, eventually it’s over. That’s how I’ve looked at this trip.
I’ve been clear on all things ending, and been fascinated by it, even when I was a kid. I remember when I was maybe 7 or 8, on a Saturday afternoon when everyone else in the house was sleeping, I was making up and singing a song to myself about someone who had a finite and short time to live, like 5 days, and what he was thinking and doing each hour, then counting down the hour. Kind of like the existentialist version of 99 bottles of beer on the wall. I remember one of my sisters walked in on me, and she thought it was kind of a strange thing to sing about. But I gotta be me.
This is one of my favorite bits in the book about my mom’s death
Our most basic prayer, during good times, is, “Please let this moment not end.” But the moment does end, as does the next, the next, and the next. For most of us, there comes a time in almost every good relationship—from the most profound to the most trivial—when joy and pleasure begin to be supplanted by sorrow and dread, when we begin to enter some version of a death watch, when everyday presence is replaced by the knowledge that this good relationship is coming to its close, or at the very least the close of its current chapter.
Our cry becomes at the end that of Madame du Barry at the foot of the guillotine: “De grâce, monsieur le bourreau, encore un petit moment!”: “I beg you, Mr. Executioner, one more small moment!” And time, omnivorous time; eater of all, eater of youth and vigor, eater of middle and old age, eater of life, eater of rocks and mountains and rivers and seas and planets themselves, eater of stars, galaxies, the universe; time, executioner of all, shows no mercy.
#
Pretend you’re in a long-distance relationship. You see each other maybe once a month. Your beloved gets off work for a long weekend, comes to visit, arrives Thursday. Thursday night is great. So is Friday, and Friday night. Saturday is wonderful, as is Saturday night. Sunday morning is nice, and by Sunday evening you’re still having a nice time, but a timer is running in your head: in 12 hours my beloved will be gone. In 11 hours. Ten. Nine. Eight. Sand grain by sand grain, drop of water by drop of water, heartbeat by heartbeat, time moves in one direction. Can none of these moments stay, we plead, just a little longer?
Even if you see each other for longer than a weekend, even if your relationship lasts years, decades, a lifetime, still, too, time moves in one direction, and draws both of you ever closer to the one inevitable end.
We often have this feeling of anticipatory grief toward the end of everything good, from the most profound to the most trivial. I don’t know if I’m the only person who slows toward the end of my first read of a delicious book. I don’t know if I’m the only person who, as a child on amusement park rides, enjoyed the first 80 percent of the ride, and spent the last 20 feeling sadness the ride was coming to an end.
All things must end.
#
I have on my lap, snuggled under the electric blanket, an ancient kitty, the last living of my mother’s animals. One by one the others died, wonderful beings in their own right and living connections to my mother. And now only she is left. I don’t know how old she is—she was already many years old when we rescued her from a breeder who kept her and other breeder cats in a small room with no human connection. We rescued all three, but the others since died—one before and one after my mother’s death.
I don’t know how much longer she will live.
This is one of my favorite lines in the entire book
And time, omnivorous time; eater of all, eater of youth and vigor, eater of middle and old age, eater of life, eater of rocks and mountains and rivers and seas and planets themselves, eater of stars, galaxies, the universe; time, executioner of all, shows no mercy.
I also love this bit, from early in the book
For 40 years, my memory has been that the accident took place not in the Salmon River Canyon, as I wrote above, but Hells Canyon, and we were driving not next to the Salmon River but the Snake River. Hells Canyon and the Snake River had become part of my personal mythology. Except when I wrote it that way, someone from the region corrected me. My memory was wrong.
There are a few directions I want to go with this.
Last night I dreamt I played basketball, sank twenty-two footers like I was seventeen. Then I woke up. Last year I played horse with the teenaged son of a friend, and while my muscle memory was intact and my form smooth—evidently shooting baskets is in this way like riding a bicycle—my legs were gone. My first half-dozen free throws were about five feet short.
I remember going through this in my thirties. In college I was a high jumper, and in my twenties I coached at a junior college. I could still practice with my athletes, demonstrate form, even compete in a few meets. My jumps were only a couple of inches off my best. In my thirties I coached at a high school. I tried demonstrating for my athletes, and, presaging what would happen decades later in basketball, the form was there but the legs were gone. I could barely get off the ground. It was as though when I was younger I’d been able to cast a spell that allowed me to levitate, lift my entire body far over the top of my head, and now I could still speak those words—levitatus miraculi—but the magic was no longer available to me. It had forever disappeared. Or maybe I’d just developed a closer relationship with gravity.
What I took from this is that part of the process of aging is the gradual exchange of physical and eventually mental abilities for experiences and memories. Later I realized that once an experience is over, it, too, is simply a memory (with maybe some scars or their opposite as physical and emotional mementos or other markers of that experience); which means that aging is the gradual exchange of physical and mental abilities for memories, and everything that goes along with those memories, including, having gathered these memories, the ability to recognize patterns in them, which one could hope to call wisdom.
But if our memories are so easily and so often wrong, what, exactly—or even generally—are we getting in exchange for the loss of these abilities? Is aging even more of a bum deal than my pathetic free throws and my inability to levitate already make it seem?
From where I’m sitting as I write this, I can see four framed pictures. One is an intricate needlepoint face of a wolf. My mom made it in the nineties for a man she was dating. When they broke up he returned it—which is a polite way of saying he dumped it on her porch—and because it had been a gift she no longer wanted it. I wasn’t going to let it go to a second-hand store, so I brought it home. He broke up with my mom because he was dying and didn’t want to burden her with taking care of him through that process, which my mother thought was absurd—it’s what you do in relationships: in sickness and in health, and all that—but while it takes two to have a relationship, it only takes one to end it. So the relationship is dead, he’s dead, my mom’s dead, their experiences of what they did together, such as their trip to Europe, are now remembered by no one; and what remains here in the physical world is a beautiful needlepointed face of a wolf.
The other three are photos from the American Civil War my mom got from the National Archives, had enlarged and framed, then gave to me one year for Christmas. One in particular always moves me. I mentioned it above. It’s of three Confederate soldiers captured at the Battle of Gettysburg. One looks to our right, the other two to our left. I don’t know their names. They’re all long dead, and their stories are probably not known even by their direct descendants. What were their experiences? What were their lives? Were they good men? Were they not? Now that they are, except for this photograph, forgotten, does it matter whether or not they were good men? And who cares—and I mean this as a question, not a slur—about their experiences, which became memories, which became nothing?
I have the same thoughts when I see those fabulous face reconstructions by the forensic craniofacial anthropologist Christopher Rynn of ancient bodies found in bogs, and I had the same thoughts when the body of Richard III was found underneath a parking lot in England. King or commoner, villain or hero, he still ended up under asphalt.
My thoughts and questions here are neither original nor profound. Or maybe they’re both, only the original parts aren’t particularly profound, and the profound parts certainly aren’t original to me. I’m just recapitulating Ozymandias, and even more famously, the opening of Lamentations, as well as the thoughts of probably almost everyone who ever lived long enough to notice that eventually even the flat parts of any path increasingly slope uphill.
I think when through age we (involuntarily) trade away physical and mental abilities, what we get in return are not so much memories as stories, both the personal stories in which we star, and the larger social, ecological, and perhaps cosmological stories in which we play greater or lesser parts.
I’ll tell you a secret sort of meta joke about the line “My thoughts and questions here are neither original nor profound. Or maybe they’re both, only the original parts aren’t particularly profound, and the profound parts certainly aren’t original to me.” I think it’s pretty funny, and for me what makes it even funnier is that it’s not my joke. It has often been attributed (wrongly) to Samuel Johnson, as Your manuscript is both good and original, but the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good, but he never said it. So I think it’s even funnier that my punchline, while funny, is not original. That’s more or less all of art.
Anyway, surgery is in 26 hours now, and then the plane and car rides the following day will be ten or twelve hours of hell, and then I’ll be home, and no matter whether they were all great fun or misery, in 50 or 52 hours from now those experiences will have been eaten by time, and will be done. And then in 12 weeks the bones will be healed, and that will be done. And then a year from now a year will have passed, no matter what I did or didn’t do with it.
Neither original nor profound, but as true as anything can be, and something so many of us, myself especially included, too often forget.
I was walking around the parking lot earlier, and I saw a honeybee walking across the asphalt. I presume she had worn out her wings, as honeybees do. I lifted her on my hand, and carried her to a bush. If I were a honeybee about to die, I would rather die next to a plant than on hot asphalt.
Thank you,
Derrick
