Age of Discovery

We cannot stop the hands of time

Nor can we slow them down.

We age, each one, at a steady climb

That can’t be turned around.

Do the things you never could.

Read a book . . . walk in the wood.

Fill your days with something new.

Study the stars high in the blue. . .

--”Growing Old Gracefully” by Samuel J. Hartman

*

Sam Hartman was never a writer. Sam Hartman was a heavy equipment mechanic who made his living with his back and his hands, a breadwinner who put three sons through college, giving them the education he never had been given.

At 82, that life is over. His working days are long behind him; his wife is dead, his children have children. And he has discovered a side to himself that he never knew existed, one he never could have imagined.

This is the literary Sam Hartman, the Sam Hartman who finds joy in words and language, a writer with a thick file of 66 poems, short stories and reflections to prove it.

“It’s like learning all over again,” he said, sitting at the kitchen table in his apartment in North Hollywood. “It’s amazing.”

At the East Valley Multipurpose Senior Center in North Hollywood, where Hartman is a member, a writing workshop meets every Friday afternoon. Ten men and women, mostly in their 80s, gather around a table and share their work with each other. Like Sam, they came belatedly to writing, after the kids were grown and the mortgage was paid, but their joy is no less intense for that. In some ways, it may be heightened.

In the nearly six years since the group started, its members have explored the world of writing in many forms. They have told stories from their past and others from their imaginations. They have written commentary, philosophy, comedy, book reviews. Sharing their writing, they also have shared their lives: news of grandchildren, vacations, good books, illness, death.

Whether they are writing fiction or personal narratives, who they are shows up on the page.

*

Time sometimes hangs heavily for a person like me who has lived a lifetime, scarcely realizing that her needs have been on hold. I’d reached the age of seventysomething vaguely bored, fatigued, wondering what life was all about anyway, preoccupied with when and how I would reach the end.

--From “A Need Realized,” an essay by Rose Rothenberg, 81

*

Workshops like these are common at senior centers and community colleges around the country. Especially popular are so-called life writing classes, where members are encouraged to write their personal histories.

Some have done so with stunning success.

At ages 102 and 103, Bessie and Sadie Delaney, sisters from New York City, published “Having Their Say,” a collection of wit and wisdom that became a bestseller and was made into a Broadway play.

And earlier this year, Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux of Manhattan, Kan., sold her memoir, “The Life of Jessie Lee Brown From Birth Up to 80 Years.” Written as an assignment for a senior program, her 208-page memoir was featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The article sparked such interest that a bidding war followed, and the manuscript sold for $1 million. Foveaux is 98.

But it’s not the prospect of fame that keeps members of the group in North Hollywood writing. They just like to write, and they like each other.

On a recent Friday, they showed up for the 90-minute session at 1:30 as usual, folders and notebooks filled with photocopies of their writings. “We try to make copies and pass them out because a lot of us are losing a bit of hearing,” explained Helen Barsha, 85. “And we try not to have them [run] too long.”

No topic is off-limits. And most members are not shy. A memory is written down and passed out for everyone to share. A moment of revelation is explored and becomes a community event. Once on paper it is tangible and easier to discuss, like Hartman’s poem about his late wife. His voice cracked as he read to the group:

*

I am there from time to time to visit in that

place sublime and tell you how I miss your tender care.

I kneel and pray and bring you flowers atoning for things unsaid. . .

*

Today, everyone in the group has written on the same topic: one wish. They go around the table taking turns reading, as easily as they might be seated at Sunday dinner passing dish after dish.

There is no teacher, and hasn’t been since the volunteer who started the group moved away a few years ago. But things flow smoothly. Assignments are decided collectively; the group is pure democracy.

None of the day’s offerings is alike.

From 82-year-old Jack Chesner comes a risque tale set in 2058, about a man who travels to a planet populated only by women. In “purely a humanitarian gesture,” the man volunteers his services to ensure the future of the planet and is given a harem.

Everybody laughs. Chesner’s X-rated pieces always make people laugh. He signs them with his pen name, “Giacomo.”

In Rose Rothenberg’s story, a fairy allows her to enjoy healthy scoops of vanilla and chocolate ice cream with no feelings of guilt “and no aftermath of a rebellious digestive tract.”

Joanie Montalbano reads a poem that leaves Chesner blank-faced and baffled.

“Where’s the wish?” he asks.

Sam Rubenstein finds it--a loving union, couched between the lines of metaphor--and explains.

Maybe you should attach a little explanation, someone tells Montalbano playfully. At 51, Montalbano is the baby of the group, the only member who is not a senior. She first came to the center to volunteer, but after learning about the group, she asked to join.

And like everyone else, she has had to learn some things, like how to accept reaction and criticism.

Until recently, Miriam Krissman, a 78-year-old widow, had a rep for writing mostly about the accomplishments of her three children or events in the news. Her writing was criticized as being flat, almost juvenile in its lack of depth. Other group members encouraged her to write with more passion and imagination. Then one Friday, she read a piece about meeting a nice gentleman in the park who asked her out for a date.

The following Friday, everyone wanted to know how her date turned out. “She said, ‘Oh, I just made that up,’ ” Barsha remembers, laughing. “It was wonderful. Before, she could never do that.”

Even writing a letter used to be an all day affair. And talking had been no easier. “I had difficulty expressing myself,” Krissman says. “I stopped working at a really early age. My husband wanted me to stay home. That’s maybe what happened to my brain. I figured this would help me, and it has.”

Toward the end of the meeting, she hands out plastic bags filled with two kinds of homemade cookies, oatmeal and poppy seed. The introvert is hard to see.

William Emker, 85, is the only member of this writing group who has had a book published. Like others in the group, he wrote his autobiography for his children and grandchildren. He wanted them to know about his life in Hitler’s Germany, when he ran a bakery as a front for the resistance, and about his life in a concentration camp, and his covert work with U.S. forces after he was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services.

Members of the workshop knew some of these things about Emker. Bits of his past had surfaced in the pieces he’d written for the workshop, like his story about Mere Bettina, an old and very courageous French woman who’d saved him from the Gestapo by hiding him in her apartment.

*

Mere Bettina is an anarchist. This white-haired lady never threw any bombs, never attacked a police station. Her anarchism is a political and philosophical belief in a beautiful Nirvana. . . . I tell her that, in my opinion, this is not a workable system in a mass society. But we get along fine.

*

Emker’s life story piqued the interest of an agent and was published in Germany. A second book, “Love Letters to Hitler,” was made into a play in Germany and last year was performed at the Jewish Theater of New York.

The second book is a compilation of letters that Emker, who is not Jewish, found in Hitler’s chancellery after the war, when he was searching it as an American operative. Thousands of letters had been written by Germans and Austrians on a variety of subjects. More than 100 were by women “who, falsely or not, were in love with Hitler and wrote him some steamy love letters,” Emker says.

Emker’s wife, Irene, 82, also is a member of the workshop and she, too, has written an autobiography. Hers begins in 1864 (“My grandfather Albert Felisch married Caecilie Behrendt in Koenigsberg, East Prussia, Germany”) and continues until her 80th year. One Christmas she gave the 169-page tome to her children and grandchildren, who’d reacted with an almost bashful silence.

“There were some things. . . ,” William says.

” . . . that kids would not like to know about their parents,” Irene finishes his sentence. “Disagreeable things that happened to me. But they did happen to me. I cannot only write beautiful stories.”

By writing down the beautiful and the ugly, the Emkers were able to share parts of their lives about which their children knew little, stories that there never had been enough time to tell.

“We were so busy with making a living in a new country that there was hardly any time for long leisurely talk,” Irene says. “The kids were in school, the kids were growing up, and there were a million things that had to be taken care of. I was working and he was working. . . .”

Others in the group also started writing to pass things along to their children but have continued to write for purposes all their own.

“Senior citizens have to have some creative outlets in order to really be functioning and enjoying life,” says Barsha, who also experiments with visual art. “You have to have something to be interested in.”

Over the years, members of the group have come and gone. Grace Greenwald died this year. Louise Ramsdale moved to Prescott, Ariz. Jane Geier is now too ill to attend.

“We call her and we send her all of our [writings] and we go visit her,” Barsha says. “She has written back sometimes. She still feels part of the group.”

At a time in their lives when friends are lost quicker than they are found, the members’ circle of confidantes has broadened. Some meet outside the group to go to concerts or other events. Two have become a couple. And along with their poems and stories, they are creating new memories.

“I have some friends who sit and watch the cars go by and watch the grass grow and I feel so sorry for those people,” Hartman says. “There’s so much more to life.”

Having conquered the computer, Hartman writes and publishes a one-page newsletter for the group. A recent edition of Writer’s Bulletin contains writing tips, updates on a member having eye trouble, a joke of the month and a word of the month: “perspicacious”--perceptive or understanding. All this is better, he says, than watching grass grow.

“I don’t want to get old that way. No one to talk to, no one to write to, no one who cares. I need people around me. I think that’s what comes out in my poems.”

At this session, one of Hartman’s poems is the last of the day to be read. At the suggestion of a group member, he had picked up a copy of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” and decided to try his hand at quatrains. The result: “Omar Was a Wino!”

*

Poems and logic in words divine,

In quatrain meter, oh so fine.

Reading between the lines you’ll see

Omar loved his jug of wine.

He seemed to do it every time.

He’d get tanked up and then start to rhyme.

But he was happy, don’t you see

In every verse he mentioned wine.

*

Hartman’s writings often bring a good laugh. They usually close with a twist, something delightful, something completely unexpected at the end. Like the birth of a poet at age 82.