I Coulda Been A Contendah

For a narcissist and egomaniac like me reading the obituaries in such publications as The New York Times and The Harvard Magazine is torture.  What have I ever done with my life?  The chances that I have missed!  True enough, growing up in a little nothing place like Iowa City is not exactly the springboard for a major launch--think "unsung Milton," and all that sort of thing.  But then I went to Andover when I was fourteen and roomed across the hall from the son of the famous German painter-in-exile, George Grosz.  Why didn't I ever get an invite to their Manhattan pad?  Heirs to Union Pacific, Kohler Plumbing, and the Los Angeles Dart fortune lived just down the hall.  Why oh why did I leave Andover after one year when I had those four available to cultivate serious friendships?  When I was eighteen I left home for New York City, but did I find fame and fortune?  No, only gonorrhea.  When I read the poems of Frank O'Hara I could kick myself. Where was his gay set, all of them just graduated from Harvard, and so three years older than me, and surely out in some bar or another, and I was bright, witty, good looking, hey, sexy! Why when I was mingling with my brother in law's painterly crowd in Greenwich Village did I not meet young gay males on the make to fame and fortune.  Frank O'Hara and his chums, they must have been everywhere in the Village. I could have become one of those bright young gay things, who went on to celebrity in Manhattan.  Instead I got married at twenty one, still out in the boondocks in Iowa, was part of a married couple at Cambridge, and, hey, then what? majored in classics and pursued a doctoral degree! Classics, dude! Doctoral degree!  Duh!  Dullsville.   This is not the road to a great obituary in The New York Times!  People who anguish over death seem to forget its one great consolation: chances are you will not know how meager or non-existent your obituary was.  So I shall keep that thought by me, try to do less measuring when reading those obits.  Actually they are a constant source of inspiration for anyone.  Persons of such creativity as to have had lives that are recorded for posterity in the Times demonstrate a remarkable capacity for reinvention and more often than not leave behind at least two and sometimes three well developed and successful careers, not to mention marriages.  Reading obituaries, apart from those needy sickos who have to measure everything against themselves, are an inspiration and suggestion of all the rich chances on offer in human lives.  I recommend obituaries to teenagers as must read literature; it gives one such hope for a creative interesting life.