Is What We Say Worth Remembering?
Considerations on legacy, in a time when legacy is part of the problem
Let’s talk about legacy.
Benjamin Lorr, in his book The Secret Life of Groceries, says, “The value of what we no longer have grows in our imagination.”
From the personal perspective, legacy can be everything, or the sense that it’s been stolen from you.
You work on something and give it your all, and see someone else get the credit. Or you get edited out of the story. You work with someone for years and find out later that you just didn’t make the cut, you weren’t memorable, or important enough, to justify inclusion in the story.
Legacy. Credit. Inclusion. Acknowledgement. Hell, even Blame.
You don’t want to watch yourself fade out of the newsprint in real time.
But from the meta perspective, isn’t legacy sort of how we got to this whole fucked up place we find ourselves in?
This longing for a lost time and feeling like the truth and validation you’ve worked your whole life believing in is drifting away from you, replaced by rappers and Instagram influencers and laws that say you’re the problem?
Never mind the embedded racism and classism and every other -ism you can pull out of that thought.
Longing for a better time that never existed in the first place. Just distant bursts of bright moments.
Legacy can be about your conviction that the lived truth of your life and your parents’ life and your grandparents is important, and needs to be remembered, glorified, notated for the annals of time.
Legacy can be about your conviction that the hard work of (y)our forefathers is being subverted and challenged, for right or wrong, by a new generation of scholars, or legal pundits or lawmakers or teachers or writers, with no clear delineation of their politics, their points of view, their preferences, their indiscretion, their hates and loves, their political and economical agendas.
Legacy can be simply about not wanting your efforts to be forgotten. If you did it for love and not money, isn’t legacy pretty much all you have left?
Or legacy can be nothing to you, your only concern being about simply wanting to exist in a time that, seemingly, doesn’t care if you do.
I remember one day, I’d been on the phone for hours, was tired of asking for money from potential investors or potential customers, and presenting various shades of the story to so many different audiences, trying to convince someone that our product was the best, the newest, the most innovative. I was tired of talking. I made the mistake of complaining to a friend.
“How many ditches did you dig today?” he said, rightly.
There are levels of discomfort and pain and hard work. Gradations. Sure, you did your job, and you got tired. That’s supposed to happen.
How many ditches did you dig?
How many meals did you skip?
How many meals were you allotted?
How many fish did you catch?
How many miles did you drive in the truck that you don’t even own, so you can get 2 hours sleep at a truck stop and hope to get your shipment in on time, only to be held at the gate, and after all the deductions and debt and fees, you owe more money than you started?
How much does my personal legacy matter to you, straw man trucker or Thai fisherman or starving inmate, how much do you give one shit? Do you really care if my full name showed up in the credits to a reissued record I worked on 20 years ago?
Even if I only did it for the love.
One time, I heard a female friend bemoaning the patriarchy. And I said to that self-same fella earlier, “she makes more many than I do and ever will.”
His response? “You’re gonna have to let that one go.”
He was, of course, right. Same guy who made the ditches comment. Dirty rotten side-mouth commenting bastard.
We had a good run. Us white males.
We can’t keep racing to some imagined better past.
Even if pop culture seems to be circling back on itself every 10-20 years, another Ourobouros, that same snake eating its own tail, or like a recycling system, turning today’s crap into tomorrow’s fiesta ware.
Take it from me, the guy who’s had the same haircut that was cool in the 50s, then the 70s, then, briefly, the 90s. I don’t know if it was ever cool on me. But there’s a whole sub-category of rockabilly folks that still keep this flag flying.
Never could stand rockabilly myself.
You can’t help sometimes feeling like your life is turning into Death of a Salesman or What Makes Sammy Run? The beat down and broken rat scrabbling at the entrance to the maze with a big piece of cheese at the end he won’t even get in enough to smell.
Does everyone only really start to understand their worth after 50?
Am I in a select club of failures, or is everyone like this, and I’m just another serial number, another asshole waiting for his colonoscopy reports or hoping this isn’t pneumonia, and finding his reading glasses just don’t quite do the trick anymore, and I used to be somebody.
I don’t feel like a failure. I help people all the time. A friend just mentioned he needed a booking agent. I made an intro. Voila
But there’s the intensely personal urge to see yourself like that polaroid from Back to the Future, and you’re slowly disappearing from the frame, until there’s nothing left.
When Don Rickles was dying, his last words to body man Tony “O” Oppedisano was “Make sure they remember my name.”
When my friend Ed was sick, he was concerned that no one would remember the amazing work he’d done for years, creating incredible music with himself or producing other bands, and Wikipedia kept erasing the entries. What a small, insignificant thing to do to someone who is dying, to just erase his name while he’s still there to see it.
We saw to that, got his Wikipedia updated, Chris Bahn stepped in and made it right.
But legacy, for Ed, that was important. Legacy for his widow, his daughter, his community.
It’s not always the source of the problem, sometimes it’s just a drop in the lake, but it’s still important.
My friend Ian Moore says my problem, career-wise, is that I care about people too much.
That’s a funny way of putting it, but in some sense he’s probably right.
I was never mercenary enough.
But maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe I need too much from people.
Is there a point where you feel, I got what I deserved? I got the credit I earned? Or is that entirely from inside you?
Is that a deal you make with yourself?
Ok self, here’s the thing: you got a square deal. You got treated ok and probably better than 90% of the people on this fair world, and that’s what you’re gonna get, and you should be happy with that. Otherwise, you’re just being greedy. And isn’t there enough greed to go around right about now?
It amazes me sometimes how little people value your time.
But time seems like an endless font until you start to see your friends die around you, and you realize that the moments you have left are the bank account, the dry powder, the precious commodity that you have left to give or to enjoy.
Legacy means something in the immediate, personal sense. It means something in your small capacity as a human to be recognized or remembered.
As with anything, context is important.
Getting the words right is important.
I wrote in my notebook at some point, some late night in the past few weeks, “The human condition is about struggling, but trying not to be a dick about it.”
I guess that’s as good a place to start as anything.
Thanks for reading Are You Experienced? And thanks for enduring my outages / rage posting. I promise to keep the 6 am Elon Musk posts to a dull roar. Also thanks to Cortney and Molly and Rose for their feedback and tender kicks in the butt about this piece, which in its first form was pretty much just me whining about shit a white guy in his ‘50s should not whining about at this particular, well, ever.
I’m Nick Tangborn and I write about aging, career, purpose, media, all through the lens of someone who is technically “old.” I don’t feel old, except when I talk to my gastroenterologist, look in the mirror, wheeze, or bend over.
This is a terrific line/insight:
“The human condition is about struggling, but trying not to be a dick about it.”
Well done, Nick. I enjoyed reading this.
Validate your own worth first, then let everything else fall into place after that. Even if certain things don't fall into all the places you wish they did, you'll still be OK with yourself.
And regardless of how your latest conversation with your gastroenterologist went, you're not Grandpa-Simpson-old quite yet — you're simply middle-aged.