Dotard viewer and dotard review are just two of the many anagrams I found when plugging DevraDoWrite in at the Internet Anagram Server. Six months shy of my fiftieth birthday, I hardly qualify as a golden-ager or oldster, but I promise you that should my postings ever show signs of a “decline in mental poise†(Britannica’s definition of dotage), I will pull the plug. Still, I do find that this coming birthday occupies my thoughts more than any previous ones. It feels like a deadline or sorts – a time by which I should be able to mark some major accomplishment or achieve success, whatever that is.
Perhaps a more apt anagram for me at this time of self-reinvention is vita reworded. While my life as an author began with computer books published in the mid-to-late 1990s, it is only in the last few years that I have found my raison d’etre as a writer: to tell the stories of people who make a positive difference in the lives of others. The people I find of interest are not A-list names and their stories may lack broad commercial appeal, but their contributions merit recognition. Some of them, such as Johnny Pate and Luther Henderson, worked with well-known musical artists, but others are just average folks like the parents and teachers involved in the birth of the middle- and high-school students marching band in Pasadena, California.
I’ll be blogging about these and other people in future posts. Meanwhile, if I heed Arthur Schopenhauer’s words – “The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it†– then I have twenty more years to make good, and that should relieve this admittedly self-imposed birthday pressure.