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The View From 95---Prologue2 • Martin Green A Senior's view of living

The last two months of 2024 were not good ones for me.  November 6th marked the second year since my wife Beverly’s passing.  It was a hard day to get through.  Then came the holidays, a time which is supposed to be difficult for those who, like myself, were grieving.  This was all too true.  As was the case last year, Thanksgiving and Christmas were were just something to endure.  On both occasions, everyone, meaning my two sons their wives and my two teenage grandsons plus my brother-in-law (my third son lives in Ireland), all came to my house and we had the traditional meals, etc.  But on Thanksgiving I wasn’t feeling especially thankful and on Christmas I certainly wasn’t feeling merry.  Then came my 95th birthday on December 30th.  I spent it alone as I didn’t see any point in everyone coming over once again just a few days after Christmas, which I told them we’d consider a Christmas/birthday occasion.
    
On my birthday my son in Ireland tried to call me and couldn’t get through. He sent a message on Telegram about this.  I thought this was just some problem with a call from overseas.  But then I got e-mails from my other two sons that they tried to call and had the same experience.  I called the phone company and somebody came the next day.  I expected him to to come in and inspect all of my three phones but this didn’t happen.  He told me it was a problem outside and the phones were fixed, a day too late.
    
I didn’t feel that reaching my 95th birthday was anything special.  I hadn’t done anything, like eating well, exercising, meditation or anything else; I attributed my longevity to my genes as my father made it to almost 99 and my mother made it to 93.  However, making it through the holidays and then my birthday and then the end of the year gave me something like a goal.  As the new year 2025 stretched ahead and, as I wrote in my journal, I felt that the outlook was pretty bleak.  After all, what was it but another year without Beverly.
    
Before going any further, I should say a little something about myself besides being very old.  I’m a New Yorker (born and raised in the Bronx) who, after college, two years in the Army (during Korea; I was stationed in Germany) and a couple of years in New York after that, decided to go West to San Francisco and have lived in California for almost the last 70 years, but am still a New Yorker.  After meeting and marrying Beverly in San Francisco, we moved to Sacramento as I worked for the State and went there for a promotion.  We bought a house in the suburbs, I commuted to work, we had our three sons and I retired when I was 61.  By a series of chance events, I became a freelance writer, did articles for the Neighbors section of the local paper, the Sacramento Bee, for about 15 years until Neighbors was subsumed by the Bee. 

We moved to a Del Webb retirement community about 27 years ago and I did articles for a monthly senior paper, then two columns---“Observations” and “Favorite Restaurants”.  This last ended when almost all restaurants closed during Covid but I’m still doing the “Observations.”  I mentioned that I kept a journal and I started keeping notes way back when working for the State and had a supervisor who’d tell me do something and then deny that he had and these evolved into a journal.  A writer is supposed to keep a jpurnal and the health experts said during Covid and the grief experts all say keeping a journal is good so in all three cases I was ahead of the game.
    
After I started doing articles I took a creative writing class at the local community college and started writing short stories.  I had a few stories in “literary” (non-paying) magazines and then online magazines came along and I found they would print my stories.  When I reached 500 articles and then 500 stories I stopped counting.  After over 30 years of writing stuff I think I’ve made about $40,000 for my articles and maybe a couple of thousand for my stories.  I also have about 16 or 17 books on Amazon, most of them collections of stories, some a collection of stories, my “Observations” column and some essays.  The first few books were paperbacks done by a self-publishing company for which I paid and I made efforts to sell them to cover the costs; the last bunch are e—books I learned to get on Amazon and I haven’t cared if anyone bought them or not.  As I’ve written elsewhere, they’re to collect my writings in one place and, since Beverly’s passing, projects to keep me occupied.
    
Let me say here that I won’t dwell on my feelings about losing Beverly.  I wrote in my column that, to borrow the words from a song, when she left she took away the sun and that about sums it up.  The reader can take it for granted that I feel the loss each and every day.  I’ll write about what it’s like to be a really old guy trying to get through his remaining days as best he can and hope my chronicle of this, besides maybe having some therapeutic value for me, will be of interest to others.  I should mention that I’ve done a memoir I called “The View From 85,” borrowing (not stealing) the title from a little book called “The View From 80,” by poet and critic Malcolm Cowley.  I then did a memoir, “The View From 90.”  I had hip replacement surgery when I was 85 and that book turned out to be mostly about that.  Covid came when I was 90 and that book turned out to be mostly about that.  I wrote both month by month, relying on my journal notes and I’ll do the same this time.  So, on to the year 2025 and we’ll find out what this book will be about.    
© Martin Green May 2025  

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