Writing the Way to a New You

“There is magic in us, Grace. It hatches over the course of our lifetimes, and sometimes we’re so tired, too tired to do anything about it. It stumbles to its feet just as we’re falling from ours.”

As I approached my 55th birthday (with the requisite palpitations not unknown to others of a similar maturity), my sun was far from setting, but I didn’t need a mirror to remind me I was on the other side of the climb. I was quite happy heading the MFA Acting Program at the University of Alabama (still am), making independent films (just did), and performing my own plays in New York (still intend to).

(I Quit Writing; Then, I Wrote My Debut Novel.)

But I could feel things winding down; even worse, I could feel me winding down. It wasn’t that I lacked the passion that launched a thousand classes, or that my plays or screenplays had curdled, I just felt as if the colors of all those things had somehow faded, as if my palate for the things I loved so much had wilted a bit, had gone just a little numb.

Two years before, when Covid-19 played a nasty game of Simon Says Shelter in Place, it left me—an unrepentant workaholic—staring at the impatient walls of my upstairs office. My wife calls the space my “Globe,” and yes, there’s quite a bit of Bard in there, but it did bring my thoughts back to my dear friend Bill, and his own struggles with plagues and the plague of Father Time.

When Shakespeare emerged from the theatre closures of 1603, he had reimagined himself as a writer, penning Othello, Macbeth, and Lear over the next three years. This was middle age at the time—Shakespeare was no rose-colored Romeo—and he could have coasted home a wealthy, accomplished writer, but something had changed, some furnace had kicked on, and off he soared into the full flowering of his creation.

Although the university restarted at its usual warp speed, that rebirth stayed with me; background noise, yes, but it was always present, and when my creative palate went numb, it retook center stage and looked dead at me. It dared me. “What will you emerge with?” it asked. And then, it hit me in a place I’d paved over many years before: “You’re almost grown up, kid,” it said. “So, what do you want to be?”

Well, that was a curveball, and although I was a bit of a magician hitting the ball off a rubber tee, the moment the pitching began, I was banished to a bench in Siberia. You see, I had initially gone into acting thinking it might teach me to write dialogue—for fiction—which, if we’re sharing creative loves and crushes, was my first. But doors soon opened to me as an actor, and so I stepped through them, and kept stepping, until I looked around and realized I’d lost something along the way, I just could not remember what.

As fifty-five approached on all cylinders, I found myself huffing and puffing away on my elliptical one day, transfixed by a re-run of one of my all-time favorite programs, Antiques Roadshow. I’ve always been mesmerized when one of their experts unmasks the mysteries of some cherished, perhaps forgotten object, especially those lost to time. And I thought of myself, lost, and my path overgrown with brush, hesitating in the middle of that crossroads; that place between what I was and what I wanted to be.

The man onscreen looked similarly lost and carried his age with the same reluctance that I did, as did the family heirloom he’d brought with him—an old, tattered blanket of seeming little value. But the revelation was a stunning one: the hand-me-down he’d been tossing over the back of a recliner was, in fact, a Navaho Ute Chief’s Blanket worth over half a million dollars. The emotion broke like a summer storm across his face, a thunder of joy, a stuttering, wordless ecstasy, and I found it impossible not to sob along with him, because, for him, it was the answer to the question that haunts us all:

What am I worth?

The watch upon our uncle’s wrist while he swung us around his living room, the love letter from grandmother to grandfather reminding us that they were just as silly as we are at love’s first blush—shouldn’t those have a value beyond a two-sentence entry in a pricing guide?

Shouldn’t we?

And so, I pried the cobwebs off the door to my first love to see if she’d remember me, and Antique was born. Grace Schaffer emerged—a woman struggling to make sense of her life after the implosion of her marriage and her position as a celebrated appraiser for Antiques Roadshow. She finds a surprising ally in a mysterious, perhaps dangerous object of unknown origin, and together they set out to do what markets and appraisers and social media cannot: to set the value, not by what someone will pay, not by clicks or likes, but by the person who cherishes it.

But Grace did something else. As I typed away in my Globe, as Grace and her mysterious companion teased out new meaning in the lives of those around them, they also teased a new meaning out in me. With every keystroke, I heard the snap of new vertebrae locking into place, lifting me upward, towards something long ago forgotten, something lost, but miraculously, found. Antique is about the enduring part of us that still glisters, underneath the varnish of our lives. A celebration of old things, forgotten things—a celebration of us. For me, it is the unearthing of a forgotten treasure from my own past. A few years ago, I wondered if it was still there, so I circled back and found the door still open, waiting for me.

“But it’s a choice, you know. What you do with it. What you’re worth.”

And so are the doors we choose to open, no matter what our age.

I choose this one. Which one will you choose?

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)