The finest one-actor stage performance I have ever seen took place in 1975. That’s when a friend and I went to see “Brief Lives” at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston. The playbill is here in my hands as I write, souvenir of a play that still reverberates in me, twenty-five years later.
The superb British actor Roy Dotrice took the part of the seventeenth century London diarist, John Aubrey. In a marvelous impersonation of that eccentric writer, Dotrice entered into the character of the man and convinced us onlookers that we were witnessing Aubrey himself in his one-room lodging.
“As the first morning light filters through the heavy curtains of John Aubrey’s chamber – which serves him as bedroom, library, kitchen and study – it slowly reveals a dusty, untidy, and overcrowded room, more like a museum than a private lodging.” This is the way the director, Patrick Garland, described the set.
The set was so intricately designed that it amounted to another part in the play. The room was incredibly crowded with books, papers, food, furnishings, and tools. One had to wonder how Aubrey, depicted as seventy years old, could ever find anything at all.
In trying to deal with my own stuff, I sometimes feel like John Aubrey. Recently, for instance, it took me weeks to find a bill that I had promised a company as a receipt. But repeated efforts to find the piece of paper had turned up nothing. I was beginning to despair of ever finding it.
Then one day, looking through a manila folder marked “House: Current,” I suddenly came across the elusive document. As the ancient Greeks would have said: Eureka! (“I have found it.”) A wave of elation wept over me as I finally held in hand the elusive piece that had defied weeks of searching.
What gave a final twist to the event was my discovering the document just where it should have been. The whole time it was lurking in the appropriate folder waiting for easy retrieval. How ironic to have failed to look in the very place where good order required the darned thing to be!
From events like this, most of us will be tempted to draw at least one rash conclusion: only older people lose things and take a long time to find them. It’s just like us elders to spend our time looking for whatever we cannot find.
But did we not all lose things when we were young? I still feel chagrin that the baseball I once owned as an adolescent, given me by my father and adorned with the signatures of the Red Sox of that era – – Ted Williams, Jimmy Foxx, Joe Cronin, Bobby Doerr, et al. – – got lost.
We also forget that, by the time of later life, we are likely to have collected an awful lot of stuff. My files are much more numerous and filled with much more material than when I was younger. Also the number of books in my house keeps growing especially since a long-ingrained taboo forbids me from throwing any of them away.
Many of the countless events and encounters we elders have experienced have left a trail. In my instance, at least, that trail consists mostly of paper. But long after the event there are also many other things – – wedding presents, photographs galore, and knick- knacks picked up on various trips.
And this law of accumulation applies, not merely to external things, but mental realities as well. If we have trouble remembering where we put something, part of it may be that our minds are so lavishly furnished now. The memory of where I put that document competes with thousands of other memories.
Reluctantly, however, I must admit the influence of another reality as well. In later life our short-term memory tends not to be so sharp as when we were young. Dredging up from the murky depths a particular bit of information often takes longer. When trying to recall where I had put that receipt put my short-term memory to a test it failed to pass.
However, inability to lay my hand on something promptly does not mean that I am “losing it.” Saying so would be jumping to a conclusion without looking at other much more likely explanations.
As admitted above, too much stuff clutters my home office. And I am not as well organized as I need to be. Ideally, I ought to be spending some time each day sorting out what needs to be saved and throwing out everything else. And the material judged worth saving ought to be put into neatly marked files where it can be retrieved in a relatively short time.
One of these days, be warned, I’m going to become super well organized. The ghost of John Aubrey is going to be exorcised from my life. In the meantime, however, please don’t ask me for anything, at least anything you need to receive from me in less than a few weeks.
Richard Griffin