Inside Those Parentheses

In my writing I love to use parenthetical expressions (as you might have noticed)--both with actual parentheses and with em dashes.* Parenthetical expressions can add all sorts of things to your writing: complexity, humor, irony, confusion (if they're not done well).

There are times--I know--when I (well) go a little overboard with them. But that's the way love is, you know? Abundance = Affection.

But the last couple of days I've been reading a book (can't tell you what it is--I'll be reviewing it for Kirkus), a book of history, a book which, on nearly every page, gives us the inclusive dates of people it's talking about--e.g., Billy the Kid (1859-1881), Jack London (1876-1916), Mary Shelley (1797-1851) (these are not in the book, BTW).

And I got to thinking, darkly (of course!), about how all of us live inside similar parentheses. For all of our lives our parentheses look like this: Daniel Osborn Dyer (1944-). That little en dash, of course, has an invisible arrowhead on it, an arrowhead pointing toward ... well ... you-know-what.**

My mother was still alive when my father died on November 30, 1999, and for nearly twenty years their gravestone bore his date (1913-1999) and a portion of hers (1919-). When she died in 2018, her final date was added to the stone.

I remember that new books used to, in the publication information (the copyright page), include parentheses for the writer--e.g., Norman Mailer (1923-). (Mailer died in 2007.)

That's no longer a feature of books. Not sure why. Maybe some writers complained? Didn't want readers to know how old they were? Could be. Remember the final four lines of Shel Silverstein's "The Little Boy and the Old Man"?

“But worst of all,” said the boy, “it seems

Grown-ups don't pay attention to me.”

And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.

“I know what you mean,” said the little old man.

Yes, I fear, in our youth-dominated culture we sometimes fail to attend to the voices of those who are ... older, those whose final number is about to pop up inside their parentheses.

Anyway, now drawing nearer to my own final parenthesis, I find that I'm a lot more sensitive than I used to be about those numbers inside. As I read, I think, I'm older than he was! Or, What a shame she lived only that long. Or, Wow! That dude was old! I'll never get there!

There's only one consolation in all of this: You'll never get to see the completed dates inside your parentheses!



*Not sure what an em dash is? Here's a link to explain.

**Link to info on the en dash.