It’s Good to Be Ninety

Steven Schrader published his memoir in December. He had just turned ninety.

The book is called The Other Steve Schrader: New and Selected Writing. It tells the story of a man who has lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for over seventy-five years—longer than most people live anywhere. His father was a Polish immigrant who arrived illegally in 1921. The next day, that immigrant was pushing a rack of dresses up Seventh Avenue. Eventually he became a prominent figure in New York’s garment district.

Schrader didn’t plan to write a memoir at ninety. An editor at Hanging Loose Press, which had published three of his previous books, encouraged him. He agreed. He sat down and wrote.

In the book, he describes walking to the grocery store seven blocks away, carrying two heavy shopping bags home. He has to stop every block to rest the bags on the low metal fences around the trees on Broadway. He knows where every tree is. He knows which blocks have no trees. On 103rd Street, there are none, so he has to make it all the way to 104th without stopping.

That is the kind of detail only a writer notices. Only a writer records.

Schrader has been many things: public school teacher, garment salesman, director of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. But as a teenager, lonely after his family moved to a new neighborhood, he read. “I think that’s what got me into writing,” he told the West Side Rag.

When asked how it feels to publish a book at ninety, he said: “I feel lucky I’ve lived this long. It’s good to be alive. It’s good to be ninety.”

May Sarton kept journals until her death at eighty-three. She published At Seventy and At Eighty-Two. She understood what it meant to write late in life.

“A face without lines that shows no mark of what has been lived through in a long life,” she wrote, “suggests something unlived, empty, behind.”

The lines on the face are earned. So are the words on the page. Both are records of a life that refused to pass without leaving a mark.

Sarton also said this: “One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.”

—

Steven Schrader knows where the trees are on Broadway. He knows which blocks have no shade, no place to rest. He has walked those blocks for seventy-five years. He wrote it down.

That is what writers do. They notice. They remember. They record the things no one else will record, the details that would otherwise vanish when the person who noticed them is gone.

Somewhere right now, someone in their seventies or eighties is wondering if it’s too late to write. They have a story. They have seventy or eighty years of noticing things. They know where the trees are. They know which blocks have no shade.

Steven Schrader says it’s good to be ninety. He says it’s good to be alive. He published a book to prove it.

What are you waiting for?

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why a book built on conviction has no expiration date.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

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