‘Hello, lifers,” the email began. It was a message from Kathleen Mellen, the Hampshire Life editor, to the writers who rotate in this spot in the magazine known as “Slice of Life.”
It’s fun to think of myself as a lifer – rather than, perhaps, a slicer. The term “lifer” does suggest internment in some sort of institution forever, but I prefer to tilt it toward describing a lifetime commitment.
Now the word “commitment” itself, if you’re inclined to explore these things — and I am — has some other connotations, one of them not so happy: incarceration in a prison or mental institution. In the happier option, the commitment is your own choice rather than that of a judge or physician: “He has a real commitment to his work,” we say. Or, when speaking of difficulties with personal relationships, especially of the long-term variety: “She has a lot of trouble with commitment.”
My husband apparently had no trouble making a lifelong commitment to Amherst College and its English department. A graduate of the place, he was “called back,” as it says on Emily Dickinson’s gravestone, and he seems mainly not to have regretted that calling, despite developments in his field that he often finds dispriting, to put it mildly.
As for me, despite some occasional wanderings, something about my psychological makeup has tended to make me a lifer in various spheres.
Over the past eight years I have come to see myself that way in relation to the Hospice of the Fisher Home in Amherst, where I first put a tentative toe into the water as a volunteer in 2007. Since then, I have never stopped admiring the way this small independent enterprise cares for dying people and their families. I wouldn’t mind ending up there myself.
I think of myself as a lifer, too, in my marriage, which, over all the hills and valleys of almost six decades, has proved to be an essential anchor to my physical, emotional and intellectual life. Thank you, Bill, for your patience and impatience, your understanding and incomprehension, your musical brilliance along with an inability to master mechanical objects, your incredible memory for poetry and your puzzling inattention to the “real” world.
Meanwhile, Bill and I have no plans to retire to somewhere other than the house we bought in Amherst in 1961. With a little bit of luck and possibly some additional assistance with practical matters, we should be able to stay here. Maybe this is just a lack of imagination, but it fits well with our lifer inclinations.
And yes, Kathleen, I see myself as a lifer when it comes to the Gazette. I grew up in a newspaper-reading family — The New York Times delivered first thing in the morning, then The New York Sun brought home in the evening by my father.
Beginning in the late ’70s, almost 40 years ago, I signed on to be what was then known rather grandiosely as the Gazette’s obituary editor, a job that no longer exists. In those days the page was written primarily by me and other staffers, not by family or friends as is currently the case.
Obituary writeups were much more formal and formulaic then, much less personal and quirky. Making my way through the journalistic ranks at the Gazette, I developed an enduring affection for the work of a daily paper, and since departing from the newsroom in 1989, I have enjoyed keeping my hand in with a regular column.
So I hope to continue and hope that the paper (will it continue to call itself a paper even as it becomes more of an electronic presence?) will continue to keep us in touch with the region’s doings as it has done since 1786 — good grief, for 230 years.
Marietta Pritchard can be reached at mppritchard@comcast.net