Obsessions, Grand and Less So
I’d like to be obsessed with travels to distant lands, with a book on the best-seller list, with a flood of easy money or a new and sumptuous love affair. If any of this comes to me in the next few months, I promise a complete depiction.
Instead, what I keep perking up to these days are stories of death and old age, of how patients confront disease and their own mortality, of what people do in their advanced years—or simply their last years. All rather grim subjects, perhaps—but I’m long past fighting what interests me, I just follow it.
What woke me up last week were some comments by Loudon Wainwright Jr, the singer-songwriter, in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. Loudon Wainwright Sr. worked with my father at Life, and once described my father as “a handsome, bright, reserved, efficient fellow…ambitious and proud,” and marked from the start for bigger things. So I’ve listened to Loudon Jr.’s songs with extra interest, and I was fascinated to hear what he had to say about Charlie Poole, the banjo player and leader of the North Carolina Ramblers. Wainwright’s latest album is called “High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project”, and on Fresh Air Wainwright described the end of Poole’s life, at the age of 39. Basically, he drank himself to death.
Wikipedia puts it this way: “Poole’s life ended after a 13-week drinking bender. He had been invited to Hollywood to play background music for a film. According to some reports, he was disheartened by the slump in record sales due to the Depression. Poole never made it to Hollywood. He died of a heart attack in May 1931.”
He went out the way he wanted to live, high wide and handsome. Or one could see it that way. Perhaps it was a good deal more desperate than that—especially with that note about being disheartened, which sounds a lot like depression.
Could I just go crazy like that some day, just to stir things up? Could my father have faced his oncoming dementia with a more violent, a more exuberant response?
Probably not. We are usually so much who we are.
Tags: alzheimer's, Charlile Poole, death, dementia, drinking, Loudon Wainwright, North Carolina Ramblers
