WRITE ABOUT AN 80-YEAR-OLD CHARACTER LIKE SHE WAS MAUDE

By El Ochiis

There was this little place in downtown Manhattan that showed art-house films or “little cult gems” as they called them. On the marquee was Harold and Maude. I plunked down my ticket price and meekly entered the ornate wooden doors, really an old New York brownstone turned movie theatre.  

The film had been described as a dead-pan disillusioned nineteen-year old, obsessed with suicide and a loveable, fun-loving, eighty-year old eccentric. Harold, an only child who dropped out of school, was obsessed with death. He spent his time around his house, a huge mansion in California, staging his own suicides – hangings, slit throats, drownings, guns, gun shots, fires.  

Harold’s odd behavior was engaging to the viewer, but extremely troublesome for his mother, who decided it was time for him to grow up and find a nice, young wife. She purchased him a new Jaguar and signed him up for a match-making service. Harold promptly retrofitted the Jaguar into a hearse and staged more suicides to scare away female suitors. 

There seemed to have been no cure for Harold, until, ironically, he finds new life at one of those funerals. Sitting in the pews of a church, at some, complete stranger’s demise, he befriends Maude, who visits funerals for her own amusement. The two strike up an instant friendship and Harold is fascinated by Maude’s free-wheeling approach to life. Maude would steal a car if she needed a ride or uproot a tree from a city street to be replanted in the forest.

When asked to explain her unorthodox actions, Maude replied: “I’m merely acting as a gentle reminder: here today, gone tomorrow.”

Exposed to such a breath of fresh air, Harold would come to learn Maude’s perspective: that there is nothing but beauty in the birth, growth, death and rebirth of all living things. Maude was captivating and electrifying – the actress who played her, Ruth Gordon, was seventy-six. David Kamp and Lawrence Levi, the writers, became my heroes and I wanted to write about age, especially those years beyond fifty-five, better; we all should – coming of age wasn’t the problem; ageism was.

  

If we, as scribes, are going to take the authority to write about something that we all will, eventually, experience, we should have the responsibility to do so with greater creativity.  

I have a character in a story who I have described as having eaten blues for breakfast for thirty-five of his eighty-seven, melancholy years before he sat down at a restaurant where a young lady, who looked like a roadie for the Black Crows, stole his heart.

Yeah, I will always keep the script from Harold and Maude in the back of my brain when I pen stories with individuals who are heading towards the ninety-year milestone in life – you should too. If you don’t like the movie, then, think about yourself, how would you want to describe you when you are eighty-three?