Essays After Eighty

by Donald Hall

  I wasn’t any good playing anything. Back in Spring Glen Grammar School, a physical education instructor came on Tuesdays and brought two basketballs and set us into circles—one for people who had passed a basketball before, another for those who hadn’t. I had touched a basketball on a Saturday at the YMCA, so I stood in the Circle of Experience. After one or two rounds our instructor switched me to the Circle of Innocence. By the time I moved on to Hamden High School the war had started. Everyone expected to be drafted shortly after graduation, so physical education amped up its requirements. We boxed. My opponent was a quiet, willowy guy and our fists mangled only the sweaty air of the gym. In spring we were required to run a quarter mile, which I mostly walked. Still, I lost my breath.

  Doubtless that’s why, when I switched to Exeter after tenth grade, I went out for cross-country. As I did laps for endurance, I heard my eighty-year-old coach—the war had resurrected elderly faculty—mutter, “Truck horse.” My feelings were hurt. I worked on improving my style, but when I ran cross-country, agony rotated from ribs of one side to ribs of the other. I faked turning my ankle.

  Summers on the farm I hayed with my grandfather. I milked cows badly, I was scared to pull eggs from underneath hens, but I liked haying. I liked sitting up front with my grandfather behind the slow old horse as we approached the hayfield. Even more I loved the slower plod back to the barn. My grandfather told story after story with affection and humor. Sometimes he recited wonderful, terrible poems he had memorized for school. Loading the rack with hay took more muscle than sitting and listening to stories, but I tolerated the strain. My grandfather, as he approached and passed seventy, stuck his pitchfork into a pile of hay and raised it over his head onto the hayrack, where I hauled it into place and treaded it down, so that interlocked forkfuls would not slide off while we plodded back home. The air inside the barn was intolerably hot and chaffy. My grandfather by himself pitched the load up to the lofts, where it would remain until winter brought the cattle inside. Meantime I rested in the cool of the living room.

  When I was sixteen, I found a girlfriend in Connecticut and stopped haying. To pay for rum and Cokes at a teenage tavern, I found a summer job where I could sit down.

  It was the wrist skill of Ping-Pong that budged me toward athletic triumph. At prep school I learned squash, where I could snap the ball with my table tennis wrists. Although the playing space was large, the rackets reached long and I delayed between points to breathe. When I got to college I tried out for the freshman team. One by one the hackers were cut, often with generous words from the young coach. Then came my one athletic triumph: I was the last man cut from the freshman squash squad at Harvard.

  In Ann Arbor, when I taught, I never lost cellar ping-pong games. My prowess went to my head, and when the Ann Arbor Table Tennis Association printed a notice in the paper, I called and asked to join. “Are you a beginner or a moderate?” said a voice. I hemmed and hawed out of modesty and was told I was a beginner. We played on adjacent basketball courts where we could retreat twenty feet behind the table to retrieve a slam. I was a beginner.

  Baseball has always been my favorite sport to follow. I could never play it. I tried and tried. I arrived at the University of Michigan as a twenty-six-year-old assistant professor without a graduate degree. The Michigan Daily told me that the English department softball team was to play against Physics at two p.m. on a Saturday. Interested students and teachers might participate. I found myself on an intramural field among a host of grad students. I was chosen—however skeptical the scholars-in-training—to play left field and bat ninth. In the second inning, before I had a chance to strike out, a fly ball approached me in the field. I kept a steady eye as I moved under it and poised my glove. The ball hit me straight on the skull. My teammates gathered around me until I staggered up and was replaced by a burly medievalist. When I collapsed on the bench, a woman approached me, saying that she was a nurse. If later I felt nauseated or had double vision, she advised me to hasten to an emergency room.

  Baseball is for watching. From April to October I watch the Red Sox every night. (Other sports fill the darker months.) I do not write; I do not work at all. After supper I become the American male—but I think I do something else. Try to forgive my comparisons, but before Yeats went to sleep every night he read an American Western. When Eliot was done with poetry and editing, he read a mystery book. Everyone who concentrates all day, in the evening needs to let the half-wit out for a walk. Sometimes it is Zane Grey, sometimes Agatha Christie, sometimes the Red Sox.

  As I entered my mid-seventies, my legs weakened and it became treacherous to walk on uneven ground. I decided that if I were to survive, I should do something. I bought a stationary bike and set it up in front of the television. Watching Ken Burns’s Civil War on tape, I managed to pump for seven minutes each day, until I fell trying to climb down from the machine, which in its turn fell on me and knocked out a tooth. I gave the bike away and bought a treadmill that was too big for the television room. In my bedroom I walked at two miles an hour listening to NPR. Each afternoon I did four minutes, sometimes even five, before sagging into bottomless boredom in spite of NPR. It was my doctor who told me about the Hogan Fitness Center at Colby-Sawyer College, only fifteen minutes away, which was Pam’s domain. Twice a week I parked outside, took an elevator upstairs to avoid climbing steps, and delivered myself to Pam in a gym cluttered with barbells and exercise machines. Twice a week we walked together around a wooden track for cardio’s fifteen minutes. We talked. Then for another fifteen minutes I attempted fitness and balance. Balance was a major problem. Pam showed me how to stand up when I fell down.

  When I was eighty my second car wreck stopped my driving and I handed my license to a state trooper. At home when I caught my breath, I telephoned Pam at the fitness center and told her, sobbing, that I could never see her again. Others could shop for me, or take me to the doctor’s, but who would drive me to the gym twice a week, hang around for half an hour, and drive me back? Pam calmed me down, saying that she would come to me. Thus Pam drives to my house twice a week at three-thirty p.m., bringing weights and straps and curved plastic platforms where I can practice losing balance. I accomplish fifteen minutes on the treadmill. I stand up from the bed with a horse collar full of sand draped around my neck as we try to fend off the wheelchair. With Pam I am able to exercise without boredom because I love her and talk to her all the time. For sixty years I have been writing my autobiography in book after book, poetry and prose, but Pam does not read autobiography, so I repeat all my stories. Sometimes I choose topics—Famous Writers I Have Known; My Athletic Career—but mostly I remain chronological, beginning with stories of my parents, who met when they attended Bates College, through my birth, through infancy and eating butter, through childhood and grammar school . . . Often when we have finished our workout, Pam takes notes on my daily achievements in malfitness, then adds a reminder of where we are in the story. When she returns from Italy we will still be at Oxford in 1952, and I will tell her about sitting at my desk typing in the frigid January of Christ Church College. At the top of her notes she has written, “He cuts fingertip off glove.”

  Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr.

  AN OP-ED IN the Boston Globe, remarking on near-corpses who keep on doing what they’ve always done, compared me to Mick Jagger. Never before had I been so honored. The columnist mentioned others: Keith Richards, Alice Munro, and William Trevor, who was born the year I was. At seventy, Jagger is a juvenile among us eighty-five-year-olds—but his face as he jumps and gyrates resembles something retrieved from a bog.

  Some honors honor. Some dishonors dishonor; some honors more or less dishonor. Grace and disgrace. Professional and personal. Disaster and survival.

  It’s all bragging. My pursuit of honor started early. When I was a boy there was a popular radio show called Quiz Kids, where young geniuses—eight years to twelve?—sat around a table with microphones and answered complicated questions from a hos
t. “Name the nations and colonies that border the Mediterranean Sea.” Maybe it was a fraud, like television quiz shows later. This enterprise published a monthly, Quiz Kids Magazine, with a column of letters from boys and girls about their avocations. I was twelve and got a dollar for my letter about my hobby of writing poetry. The check was a big deal—my weekly allowance was fifty cents—but the honor of publication was monumental. My hobby turned into my profession.

  It’s personal dishonor to spend a night in jail, especially for a crime as vulgar as DUI. One morning in Michigan, a year after my divorce, my girlfriend telephoned to cancel our excursion to New York. She hadn’t slept all night. She feared her boyfriend would find out about us. She resisted my jocular entreaties and my frantic ones, and when I turned nasty she hung up in rage. I swallowed a diet spansule at eight a.m., which would keep me alert and speedy all day, and drove to a bar in the country. It was isolated, sleazy, and opened early. I ordered beer by the pitcher, and finished three before returning to Ann Arbor, where I struggled from bar to bar. My belly swollen with gallons of Heineken and Amstel, I may have eaten a hamburger by midnight, when I decided it was time to drive home. I walked back carefully, lurching, and as I opened the car door a police cruiser pulled up beside me. “Don’t drive, buddy.” Immediately I understood the policeman’s benign advice. “Oh, thank you, officer. I’m much obliged. Thank you.”

  I started walking home, only a mile away, planning to wake early and retrieve my Plymouth. Then I suffered one of those flashes of intuition common to people who have drunk beer for sixteen hours. The night air has cleared my head! Of course I can drive! With my right wheels in the gutter, I wobbled at five miles an hour and the same policeman arrested me. I spent the night in jail and lost my license for three months. At least I learned something. The drunk tank was outfitted with bunks of sheet steel. It was a Friday night and all bunks were occupied. On the concrete floor I sprawled out among others, and dozed in five-minute stretches until the bone pain woke me up. During the night, a generous bunker departed his metal mattress and tapped me on the shoulder. A sheet of steel, as I discovered, was soft as lamb’s wool compared to concrete.

  When you read the back flap of a book of poems, or a contributor’s note for a short story, or hear the introduction to a writer reading his work, the list of honors is interminable. We hear of first book prizes, second book prizes, prizes named for writers who won earlier prizes (there is a Donald Hall Prize), as well as medals and fellowships and residencies. It is even noted when writers were short-listed for something they didn’t win. My favorite is “Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.” Each year a panel of three poet-outsiders lists three candidates from a thousand nominees and sends their names to the Pulitzer people. Once I was a panelist, and my house filled with boxes of deplorable books nominated—because anybody can nominate anybody for a Pulitzer. In Michigan I knew two young poets, untalented pals who published each other and nominated each other regularly for the Pulitzer Prize. Their book jackets noted the honor.

  Like an idiot, I was flattered at first to get honorary degrees. Donors to a college receive most unearned doctorates, but academic institutions try to cover their fundraising by decorating a few cultural or political figures. I sweated in cap and gown under the sun hearing graduates’ names pompously uttered. I sat beside governmental stars and we chattered about politics while ex-students crossed a stage shaking hands and clutching certificates. When cheers rang out for a sorority queen or a football captain, we middle-aged honorees clapped and dehydrated. But I was not running for office, and I wearied of accepting doctorates, dishonored by honor. Upstairs there remains a hat rack of gowns topped with caps beside a table holding dusty diplomas. The poet Geoffrey Hill has addressed me as “Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr.”

  I claim it an honor that in 1975 I gave up lifetime tenure, medical expenses, and a pension in exchange for forty joyous years of freelance writing. One children’s book won a Caldecott, and will stay in print after the rest of my things are no longer available. I wrote poetry, but not for monetary reward. For mortgage and food I produced magazine pieces about baseball and New Hampshire. I could not do it now. Only the New Yorker remains among magazines that pay enough to notice. Esquire and the Atlantic and Harper’s begin to collapse like Godey’s Lady’s Book. Well, Playboy survives. The good thing is that Playboy pays; the bad thing is that no one reads it.

  Perpetual falling down is not a dishonor so much as a disadvantage. On a day when Jane was alive I took Gus for a walk. He wrapped his leash around me and I fell face-first in the driveway’s gravel. I put the dog back in the house, wrapped a towel around my cheeks, wrote Jane a note—she was lunching with a friend—and drove to Emergency as the towel sopped up blood. When Dr. Yuskaitis had removed one hundred and forty-seven specks of gravel from my face, grappling with his sterile tweezers, he remarked, “How tedious.” Ten years after Jane died, I met Linda at a church supper poetry reading. The day before, I had fallen over an ottoman to crack my ribs and blacken my eye. Another time I was running to the car to drive with Linda to a restaurant and my right foot tripped over a brick. “It’s okay,” I said. “It doesn’t hurt. Let’s go to Piero’s.” I was interrupted by blood flowing down my face, and we sped to Emergency. Linda was appalled. It was a pity to miss Piero’s luganiga, but at least I got a free haircut and a set of stitches. Once in an airport I carefully sat down, waiting for luggage, on a bench that was not there. In Manhattan I emerged from a theater with my daughter and her family. I was running away from The Lion King and scrambled behind a woman who unfortunately dragged a suitcase. A crowd gathered. A woman shouted, “Get him a Pepsi!” Which seemed strange until I noticed that my face was ballooning.

  These falls happened before I became disabled.

  Some honors get more attention than others. When I visited the White House and the President hung a medal around my neck, my local newspaper ran a story on the front page. No one else noticed. On the other hand, there was the announcement that I would become Poet Laureate of the United States. A week later a New Hampshire Public Radio interviewer asked me how it felt to be appointed Poet Laureate. I told her, “Devastated.” I was molested by letters, telephone calls, and interviews. Three television companies occupied my farm. (Only PBS was friendly and smart.) Radio stations pushed microphones into my face. I had visits from the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Concord Monitor. Many journalists brought cameramen, and Sports Illustrated pictured me with my grandfather’s bat on my shoulder. The New York Times noticed my appointment below the fold and later added an op-ed. The Wall Street Journal did two pieces, a news item and a glittering essay. My appointment as Laureate even crossed the ocean. “J.C.,” who writes the back-page column for the Times Literary Supplement, recorded my appointment with approval and quoted from a TLS poem of mine I didn’t remember.

  After weeks of chatter and overattention, I ran away with Linda to silence at Ipanema in Brazil. When we returned to New Hampshire a stranger in a restaurant—with a beehive hairdo—ordered me a napoleon. Later, I was a useless Laureate.

  Like everyone at eighty, I assumed that I was a good driver. Kendel had cut clippings from a newspaper offering refresher courses for senior drivers, but I was too busy. (Maybe she had noticed something?) In May I drove to New London to buy some sausages. As I drove back I was smoking a cigarette. It dropped from my hand to the car’s floor and I reached down to pick it up. My fingers could not feel the butt, so I took a peek. The next thing I remember is the compression of my seat belt and the thud of a slow-moving head-on collision. The car I had struck dropped its engine to the pavement. I looked for victims. An ambulance sirened up to attend to dismemberment and death, which thank goodness had not happened. The couple in the car I hit staggered out intact, and I approached them to apologize. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault.” The man had an epiphany. “Are you Donald Hall? I’ve always wanted to meet you.” I answered, “Sorry to bump into you this
way.” He didn’t laugh at my joke.

  Friends happened by and helped me home. The car was towed to the body shop on Pancake Road, where Jeff Sanborn put it together again. Weeks later, the Wilmot policeman stopped by with a ticket.

  In August of the same year I did it again, although I no longer smoked while driving. This time I was criminally impatient. I left my house at six or six-thirty to get the paper and a breakfast sandwich. It was raining hard, a thunderstorm, as I drove to the Circle K. When I came out, the rain was harder and I rushed into my Honda. Impetuously I pulled out onto Route 11 while the thunderstorm thickened. I could not see the pavement. I was moving slowly—not drunk, not reaching for a cigarette—in search of a fence to the right, thinking I could scrape against it and stop. Then I felt the now-familiar zap of a low-speed collision. The rainburst stopped and the sun came out. I stared ahead at the compact car mating with my Honda. I had somehow meandered to the left-hand side of the road.

  Another car had hit the rear of the car I hit. How many people dialed 911 on their cell phones? Ambulances arrived, police cars, fire trucks. At first I could not open my door, but someone came with a crowbar. Again I hadn’t killed anybody. A sensible, depressing thought settled in: I will never drive again. A state trooper held out his hand and I gave him my license.