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The People Who Give Us Gifts All Year — the Overcomers

December 23, 2016 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

Certain gifts are given to us year in and year out. They are the gifts that keep on giving and they come, to my mind, from people I call “The Overcomers.”

This Christmas week A.A. Gill, one of Britain’s most extraordinary newspaper columnists, died at the age of 62. Gill was nominally a food critic. He used that position as a launchpad for some of the most entertaining and acerbic writing anywhere.

His column in Britain’s The Sunday Times was a weekly joy. But Gill didn’t get there easily. First, he nearly died of alcoholism at the age of 30. He wrote a book about it.

Gill straightened out his drinking, but he never straightened out his awful spelling and severe dyslexia. He overcame them largely by phoning in his columns.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the greatest literary talents to come out of South America, struggled with terrible spelling that he detailed in his extraordinary autobiography, “Living to Tell the Tale.” But it didn’t stop him from authoring masterpieces like “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

Willard Scott, who had a successful career in radio in the Washington market before making it as a personality and weatherman on NBC’s “Today” show, suffered acute stage fright. He testified before Congress so that his experience would help others.

But in my random selection of overcomers, the biggest is Laura Hillenbrand, the author of two nonfiction bestsellers, “Seabiscuit: An American Legend” and “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption.” Both were massive works of research and narrative writing.

The back story, though, is one of suffering, terrible unrelenting suffering. Hillenbrand is afflicted with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

This is a disease that knows no mercy; a life-sentence disease without a cure and no proven therapy. It punishes sufferers for any effort, even mild exercise, condemning them to bed, often for days. The symptoms are extreme fatigue, migraine headache, aching joints, hyper-sensitivity to light and sound, and dysphasia. Some patients are bedridden for years.

Hillenbrand missed her own wedding because she was unable to walk downstairs or to look down. Yet, this overcomer researched and wrote two extraordinary books. Just as important, in a seminal July 7, 2003, essay in The New Yorker, she told her own story, comforting fellow sufferers and prompting the medical world to take ME more seriously.

My favorite overcomer was a waiter at the National Press Club in Washington, known simply as Mr. Blue. He was a man of such innate dignity that everyone called him “Mister,” and no one seemed to know his first name.

Mr. Blue had had a hard life as an African- American with no education. In fact, he was illiterate, and I was one of the few to find out.

At the club in the 1970s, when I knew Blue, the waiters carried loose, paper checks on which members wrote their orders and club numbers. Blue survived by feats of memory, remembering who had written out which check by keeping them in order. One day, his system failed: He dropped his checks. Mr. Blue was distraught to tears.

Shame is a powerful censor and, like most censorship, it neither helps the sufferer, nor does it do anything for the body politic. No one wants to be famous for their inadequacies or their sickness. But going public comforts and is a gift. It is the gift, so important in the holidays, of saying: You are not alone.

In that spirit, I have to go public with this: I am, for a broadcaster, a bad sight-reader. I have mild dyslexia, and I’ve been humiliated by my terrible spelling all of my long life in journalism. Happy holidays!

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: A.A. Gill, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Laura Hillenbrand, myalgic encephalomyelitis, National Press Club, Willard Scott

There’s No Gold in Them Thar Years

March 22, 2010 by Llewellyn King 4 Comments

You don’t grow old gradually. It’s a sudden thing.

You probably haven’t even realized you’re in late middle age. Then, without warning, you’ve crossed the age meridian irrevocably.

You’re old.

It’s a sobering business. Chances are you won’t forget where you were when old age arrived, like the day President Kennedy was assassinated.

I was at the Amtrak ticket counter at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The woman ticket seller looked at me and said: You get the senior discount.

Senior discount? Never heard of it before then.

I glanced over my shoulder, thinking the clerk was addressing someone behind me. There was no one there.

I was the subject of her compassion. Damn!

It’s not so much about being old, it’s about privacy. Everyone knows from your face you’re old and treats you with toxic kindness: Would you like to sit? Why don’t you take the elevator? We won’t be late.

But the really awful patronage comes from doctors.

In particular, doctors who tell you what they think you’ll like to hear. Try these cheering words from the mavens of Medicare: Your knees aren’t bad for your age. You have an enlarged prostate, but that’s normal for a man of your age.

Man of your age. That’s hate speech in the ears of older patients.

Worse. It’s medical relativism. It makes you feel like you’re akin to the vehicles at Rent-A-Wreck: You’ll get down the road, but not out of state. Like most men, and the same goes for women, you’re clapped out, past your sell-by date, out of the prospect of medical miracles. Unlike the way Dylan Thomas dispatched his old dad, you’re going to go gentle into that good night.

One of Americas more interesting captains of industry is John Rowe. He’s chairman of Exelon, the giant utility company. When asked at the National Press Club which companies Exelon was lusting to acquire, Rowe responded as though the question was about something human: I’m 64, and lust is a big problem.

It was a crafty double entendre. Young reporters thought he was talking acquisitions, but the men of the age of hot type knew differently.

When you’re in the Medicare generation, you’re by definition in lust deficit. You can lust, but you’ll most likely lust alone.

For example, the old luster meets a young lustee at a party. The charm flows, the wine provokes, and then the awful remark that deflates: You’ve had such an interesting life. Words like that inter hope. They put you in your place with your prosthesis, dental implants and all those pills, which suddenly you need, or you’re told you need.

There are some delightful goodies in store for oldies. You pay half price on public transport in many places, younger people usually offer you their seats on trains and buses, doctors charge Medicare and not you for care, and the government sends you checks. You can jump the line at airports on geriatric grounds, and you can doze off anywhere when things get boring. You can wear a brown belt with black shoes, and you can question prices without shame: Does the soup come with the entree? Eccentricity gets new license.

Then there’s the capriciousness of memory. A friend in Hong Kong sent me a long e-mail about people we went to middle school with. I wrote back, congratulating him on his memory. He fired back: Thanks, but I wish I remembered where I parked my car? I haven’t seen it for two days.

Should he be allowed to drive? Have the authorities taken his car?

I, you understand, am a particularly boyish 70. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Exelon, John Rowe, National Press Club, old age

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