I’ve written on Hoodoo previously that I don’t blame young people for holding golden-agers, i.e., senior-citizens, i.e., their elders, i.e., old farts in contempt as we shuffle along taking tiny steps, fumbling for our checkbooks while striking up conversations with grocery store clerks, or poke along doing 45 in passing lanes, oblivious to the hustle and bustle of Late Empire capitalism.

Even I-and-I, a forgetful 70-year-old, have been known to disparage my fellow geriatrics when their egocentricity (or declining faculties) don’t take in account the needs of others. No doubt I get on young people’s nerves myself, an overly dressed gadfly Oscar Wilde wannabe nodding my head and droning on about myself on barstools and in dentist offices.

Yet here I am in my twilight the author of a little ol’ bagatelle of a YA novel written on a 12th-grade-plus reading level, and I’m shamelessly promoting it as if it’s the great American novel.  Three newspaper articles have appeared that focus on my late life productivity^[1], and I’ve also appeared on midday local television program talking about me, me, me, not exactly a fascinating subject.

Ultimately, it’s much ado about not much.

Yet it does give me something to do and to dread.

My sons and their significant others are coming to the book launch^[2] (Harrison and Taryn from Chevy Chase, Ned and Ina from Nuremburg), Old and new friends will be there. Eugene Platt, who has recently published his collected poems Weaned on War will introduce me, an honor for sure. I see the launch as a sort of funeral I get to enjoy before I die.

However, I do want to set it down here that I’m a little ashamed of myself for all this hullabaloo. There’s something a little tawdry about it, a little needy. 

Rather, I should 

like a laughing string

Whereon mad fingers play

Amid a place of stone,

Be secret and exult

or better yet, as the young people say STFU.

Cheers!

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^[1] I’m also, to use a polite term, a digital collagist.

^[2]Buxton Books, 120 King Street, 11 April 2023 6 PM rsvp@buxtonbooks.com