Running for Your Life: Quietude and Plenitude

My hero Bessie Doenges didn’t live long enough to witness the cultural sanctification of Steve Jobs, the wizard god of gadgets (See previous post, “Running for Your Life: Jobs, Revisited”). The sole misgiving of that fact being that she didn’t weigh in on Jobs’ contribution to the affairs of women. And, baby, when it came to weighing cultural contributions, Bessie delivered the goods.

Bessie Doenges penned Bessie Writes. Well, actually, no. Bessie typed on an ancient manual Olympia her 250-word Bessie Writes columns that she then mailed (with a stamp and envelope that she bought with her writer’s wages, $20 per column) to me, her editor at The Westsider and Chelsea Clinton News, two Manhattan-based weekly newspapers that I ran in the early to mid-1990s. Here’s a sample. Not a column, but a letter to me, typed on that Olympia. I keep it in a place of honor at my desk:

Dear Larry:                                                                  10/17/94
These true stories of mine are 400 words, not 200 which you seem to prefer. I got my guts in them. I don’t write easily. I hope you’ll give them space. In our Senior Center they will be on a bulletin board with my picture next week. I love you.

Bessie
P.S. I managed to get it on one page after all.

Bessie died in her 90s – but not before she was discovered. I have all the hard copies of her column – her first weekly one in her life – after eight decades of writing http://nyti.ms/xFz0Hr. Occasionally, I mine them like rich veins. In these days of Twitter, I wonder how Bessie would respond to her fans that she needed to boil down her poetic observations of life, aging and memory to 140 characters. I dare say she would tell her Twitter editors that there was no way she could say what she needed to say with such brevity. Then, she’d sparkle: “I managed to get it into 140 characters after all.”

Consider this: A Bessie Writes tweet. (Apologies to BD purists.)

My feet go to sleep;/Must I weep?/I can’t hear;/Life’s still dear./Very gently I bite/My arm and taste/The salt.

One of my favorite expressions of Bessie’s was that in old age she sought a balance of quietude and plenitude. She talks about it in an excerpt from an Q&A article in Friends magazine (March/April 1996. Sadly this article doesn’t exist in cyberspace, or at least not anywhere where I could find it.)

“I have a motto that I live by,” she told the interviewer George W. Stone. “Quietude and plenitude. I want to be quiet, but I also want to reach out and experience life.”

Here’s a good example from a Bessie Writes column (The Westsider/Chelsea Clinton News, Dec. 9-15, 1993) of what she’s talking about:

“The lady bent to breathe in the sweet scent of lilies of the valley, those small, white trembling bells in their sheaths. She was astonished to find they had no smell at all. She inhaled as deeply as she could, only to find a cold nothing. Something had been stolen from her! Other people could smell them and she couldn’t – it wasn’t fair.


What possibly could compensate for this loss? Well, at her senior center she knew at least 200 people, out of which a few had a rather bad odor. But if everyone else could smell them, she couldn’t. She might hug them, and even kiss them, if she chose. And to be able to give comfort and affection to people who seldom get it is perhaps as rewarding a thing as smelling the small lilies.


That smart cookie, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said it all when he wrote: ‘When half-gods go, the gods arrive.’ ”


Unlike Steve Jobs, Bessie doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry. Perhaps she will one day. But I think she would’ve hardly approved. Bessie was original Old School, a woman who could trace a family memory, an ancient aunt (I mean Bessie herself lived with the most active of minds until just south of a century . . .) who had overheard as a child a conversation about the killing of a president: The president was Abraham Lincoln.

I’d like to think that Bessie is hero material for 2012. (I know that she would be very excited about what the young people did and are doing with Occupy Wall Street!) But one day I would love to see her collected columns published. Of course, that would likely then merit her a Wiki entry. She may not have approved, but this Old School boy would love to see her name and work remembered in every conceivable way.

Next: Running for Your Life: A Change of Pace