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"Sing! Fear is a man's best friend!"

Perhaps the kindest advice I can offer younger readers is to be careful what lyric fragments stick in your head, and how you choose to live them out. John Cale was only temporarily a moving force in my listening, but that one song -- that one line -- has served surprisingly well.

Six years ago, now, when I had briefly resumed running short distances. My body quickly voted otherwise, which is still a pity, though, middle age being what it apparently is, long walks seem to do much the same job. Anyway, I was meditating hard on the choice we then faced: whether to have a child. It had never been one of my goals, and yet...and yet...and so I ran and meditated and ran and stalled and ran until I came around the corner where the crack house had been burned to the ground, two blocks from my front door (12th South in Nashville gentrified quickly, once it got started), and that phrase kicked in.

Translated as: Do the thing you're most afraid of. And so we have Maggie, who is just now raging in her bedroom against the necessity of sleep. Which she is not afraid of. She's afraid of missing something, which I quite understand.

Flying back to Seattle last week, my family safely in Morehead while my business partners and I contemplated the ends and beginnings of things, I caught up on some reading, which is how I came to be startled by a paragraph in the January/February Atlantic Monthly, part of their state of the union package. This paragraph, buried midway through a piece titled "No Country For Young Men" by Megan McArdle:

"Somewhere around the age of 45 or 50, the experience of losing a job seems to change dramatically. Whatever the reason behind the job loss, long-term unemployment becomes a much more likely prospect. People older than this are somehow unwilling to accept a new, lower-paying or lower-status position, even if that refusal causes substantial economic hardship. Instead, they may label themselves consultants and wait for a job comparable to the one they lost, one that, in all too many cases, never comes along; or go on disability; or simply exit the workforce altogether."

I will turn 49 a few days after the final issue of ND is published. Some days later, Maggie will turn five.

Talking to friends these last few months, I have learned the truth of that. My generation, or, at least, those of us who followed a path similar to mine and sought to master a semi-commercial kind of art and to work with a fair degree of independence, we're out of work. I could run a fleet of magazines with the talented designers, writers, photographers, illustrators, and editors in my general circle of friends who no longer have dependable employment. A fleet of really good magazines, at least by the standards we all grew up with.

That's just my circle of friends. I bet that same story flies through dozens of other industries.

Thirty years I have spent learning to do this job, never doing it well enough.

I do not know that I will ever be allowed to do this particular job again: To make a magazine. To make a magazine about a subject I love, with people I respect deeply, and with virtually complete creative freedom, but for those moments when Peter and I disagreed about the merits of this act, or that. But even to make a magazine.

This has been a sad day. These have been sad days, leading up, and as much as I look forward to seeing and saying goodbye to old friends in Austin this SXSW, I dread it. I know that at some wonderfully inopportune moment I will fall to pieces. And I know that's part of it.

Another phrase comes to mind, from a Sterling North book I read as a young person and cannot find just now, though I think it comes from Seth and was spoken by the boy's grandmother when he bridled at doing what he thought women's work: "Work," she said, "doesn't care who does it."

Please understand: Many kind things have been said about and to us today, and we are all grateful. It is not my purpose here (nor ever) to seek sympathy, but it is always my purpose to be as direct and as honest as I can make the words. No matter what.

"Sing! Fear is a man's best friend!"

I do not know what is next, and, for the moment, that is OK. But I know keenly what is being lost.

Not what is being lost by me, by we have been deeply involved with ND these last 13 years. What is being lost if the market continues to dumb down our discourse, and if the marketplace decides that the knowledge and experience of my generation -- and we still think and feel young, despite our knees, damnit! -- is to be cast to some dungheap.

I don't know what any of this means, save that there's a tall, cool glass in the next room, and that I married a very good woman. The rest will take care of itself. And, anyway, I sing so badly Maggie hits me after the first line, and she's right to do so!

Y'all be good. I'll be back another time.

And one of these days I'll figure out what the next thing I'm most afraid of is, this time.

Posted by grant on February 19, 2008 8:08 PM | Permalink

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