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Friday, August 24, 2007

The World is Gonna Miss you, Grace

Sad news from yesterday afternoon: the death of writer and activist Grace Paley. In her Salon Interview All My Habits Are Bad, nine years ago, Grace responded to the question "Any thoughts on Aging?" with these two paragraphs:

My general feeling is that, if you're healthy and you have enough money to live decently -- if not flagrantly -- getting older is OK. I mean, I don't mind it at all. What I mind, of course, is that my time is getting short, that I won't see my youngest grandchild grow up -- those things that you're gonna miss. I remember my father feeling like that. I have a poem about it -- he knew he wasn't gonna see the end of the Vietnam War. He said: "Goddammit, I'll never know how they got out." There's a lot you won't know. And there's sadness because your friends are dying. And with the terrible things in the world, with the idea that you're gonna leave the world maybe worse than you found it -- I don't like that feeling at all.

But if your health is good, and you have a habit of looking at each day as a whole day -- unless you drop dead at noon or something -- then every day you live something interesting. It's interesting because you either meet a new tree or if you're in the city, you meet a new person. Or something happens. The sun shifts on the mountain -- very beautiful things happen.

There are many events in today's world the denouement of which Grace won't know. But one thing is for sure: if the world is worse now than it was when she found it, it's through no fault of hers. She described herself as "a combative pacifist and a cooperative anarchist," and spent her 84 years on the planet involved in many of the major social struggles of her time: the arms race, nuclear proliferation, the Viet-Nam war, women's rights, social justice. and most recently the war in Iraq. She lived a serious life with elfish irreverence and humor. Her stories capture the human spirit in the most everyday of life circumstances. The copy of her Collected Stories that she autographed at a reading in Provincetown is one of my most cherished possessions. As is the memory of the little old lady in tennis shoes and a tattered tshirt, chewing gum and laughing with her audience as we swapped stories. There has recently been a lot of Internet flap over a poll showing that Liberals read more books than Conservatives. If you consider yourself a liberal, and haven't yet read Grace Paley's small but powerful opus, it's time to get started.

New York Times obit: Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies

posted at 9:26:00 AM by marigolds2

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