Paul Lerner had lived, with his wife Sally, in a Northern
Californian retirement community, for the last ten years. When youve been
a retiree for that length of time you develop certain routines. Pauls
last action before going to bed was always, unless, as sometimes happened, he
forgot, to check his computer for any late e-mails, then close it down for the
night. In his retirement, Paul had become a kind of writer, doing a monthly
column for a senior newspaper and writing short stories for a number of online
magazines, whose editors did sometimes send him e-mails that arrived late at
night.
On this night, after going through his usual routine (there were
no e-mails), Paul looked at the letter on his computer desk. It was from his
health plan and, he was sure, contained the results of some tests hed
recently taken. Normally, hed have opened the envelope as soon as it
arrived and looked at the results. Why hadnt he done so this time? He
supposed it was because hed had such a good day and didnt want to
take a chance on spoiling it. The test results could wait another day; they
wouldnt change.
Paul considered that if he was writing this as a short story
(called, say, The Test Results), starting it before just before
going to bed would be unusual. It was common for authors to start a story when
the main character first awakened. This allowed the author to set the stage for
the action to come. Sam turned the alarm clock off and buried his head
beneath the pillows. He didnt really want to get up and face going to
work that day. Or: Suzie leapt out of bed. He was coming home today,
after two years in Iraq; but would he remember her? It also gave the author
a chance to describe his character as he or she looked into the bathroom
mirror. Sam saw an anxious face with bloodshot eyes and a stubble of beard.
Suzie saw a teenager with blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes. How would he
describe himself in the mirror? An elderly gentleman with sparse hair, age
spots, and many lines from
from what? A lifetime of care? No, not
really.
After getting into bed, Paul kissed Sally and told her that he
loved her, another customary routine. Then, as usual, he went over in his mind
the events of the day. It had begun when he turned on his computer, as he
always did first thing in the morning, and found an e-mail from one of his
editors saying that Pauls story would be featured in the next issue of
his online magazine. Paul had been fond of that story, and the editor had
turned down the two previous stories hed sent, so that was good news
indeed.
After breakfast, hed done the days crossword puzzle,
not easy on a Saturday, sometimes harder than the Sunday one. At his weekly
pool game that morning, after losing the first two games and seemingly on his
way to defeat in the third, hed made a miraculous two-cushion shot, then
had sunk the eight ball with another difficult shot. At his weekly bridge game
that afternoon, hed held good cards in almost every game and had ended
with the most points after three rubbers. Very satisfying.
It was satisfying also that he and Sally had enough money to
live comfortably in retirement. And theyd both been fairly healthy, even
though hed had a surgery last year. One of the drawbacks of living in a
retirement community was that as everyone became older, friends and
acquaintances began to get sick or pass away. When you were in your seventies,
approaching 80, Paul had found that it was difficult to avoid thinking of your
own mortality, thoughts that usually came just about this time, before falling
asleep. He repeatedly told himself to just take life one day at a time, a
cliché but not that easy to do. Well, this day was over and hed
look at those test results tomorrow.
Paul slept until almost nine the next morning. After breakfast,
he tackled the Sunday crossword puzzle (good for the aging mind, the experts
said) and, with the help of his computer (you could Google nearly everything
nowadays) finished it. Then he opened the envelope containing his test results.
If he was writing this as a story, he thought, he could end it right here and
leave the reader in suspense. The creator of the TV show, The
Sopranos, had recently done something like that, ending with a scene that
went black, and the critics had thought this was a stroke of genius. This was
the way life was, theyd said, no neat endings; it just went on.
But he didnt think this would be fair. You couldnt
string your reader along and then leave your story up in the air. He looked at
the test results. Damn! They were inconclusive. His doctor had scrawled a note
on them; he wanted Paul to take the tests again in three months. Well, at his
age three months was a considerable time. Hed try to take the three
months one day at a time. He went to tell Sally the news.