The Ancient Minstrel

Author’s Note

Some years ago when I was verging on sixty years and feeling poignantly the threat of death I actually said to myself, “Time to write a memoir.” So I did. Time told another story and over fifteen years later I’m still not dead, a fine surprise for a poet who presumed he’d die young in a pile on the house floor, or perhaps near the usual fountain in Rome, or withering to nothing in a garret in Paris torturously located above a bistro so I could smell food I couldn’t afford to buy. I choke on a fishbone I found in the garbage, and the violent coughing and hemorrhaging kill me by dawn, still sprawled in the alley after a night of chilly rain. The shivering likely kept me alive for the night. A lovely jogger in green shorts discovers me and stands above my head, leaning over and looking for life signs of which there are none except a flickering right eye. The left eye was blind since childhood. It occurrs to me that looking up at her winsome crotch I was born and am dying between a woman’s legs. How appropriate because this locale has drawn a fair amount of attention in my life.

I don’t regret waiting on illusions because that seems the fairness of living. In fact I spent a month trying to figure out whether I should call this novella “The Ancient Minstrel” or “The Ancient Mongrel.” Both are apt whether you are showing off for pay or doing your brilliant dog tricks for pay. Mongrels are especially similar to writers. The parentage of the arts is often lost to history, or the matter has evoked dishonesty. Who cares about your noble ancestry when all of the proof is on the page? I studied Dostoyevsky and Faulkner very hard but don’t see any evidence in my own work.

To be honest, which often I am not, when I began, my family insisted on being left out. My wife led the charge knowing altogether too well the fables of a writer. A friend, a successful novelist, had written a memoir that included information about his wife’s affairs, affairs which in fact didn’t exist but he included to absolve his own behavior. I admitted to myself that the same was not beyond me though I would veil it all as jest. My two married daughters were both at dinner and shouted in chorus, “Leave us out!” I felt near tears (from several drinks) and unfairly treated. I asked, “You don’t trust my taste?” to which I received a resounding “No.”

I decided to continue the memoir in the form of a novella. At this late date I couldn’t bear to lapse into any delusions of reality in nonfiction.