Mair SOMETIMES, IF carefully nurtured, a dream deferred can ripen into a beautiful fruit. Raymond Mair deferred his dream of writing full-time most of his life. Now, in his golden years, it is finally happening.
Mair met with The Gleaner earlier this week. We are sitting on the back verandah of his townhouse. The sun and rain have been playing a mild game of 'stucky'. Wind chimes sing delicately in the light afternoon breeze, breaking a welcome respite from Kingston's mid-afternoon heat.
He explains that though he would have liked to pursue the wanderings of his pen earlier, he would not call it a major regret. "It would be easy and shallow to say yes (it is a regret)," he says, "because one has to do what one has to do and I had to take care of my family. But it would have been nice to write more in those early days and become immersed in a world of writing," says the father of three and grandfather of four.
Three years after retirement, Mair intends to do just that. His first collection of poetry, 'These Days I Celebrate', which was self-published in 2003, was the first step.
A GLIMPSE OF DEATH
Mair realised that he had better get cracking when illness brought him a glimpse of death's scythe. Facing his own mortality, he decided to make his retirement a fruitful one. "Retirement is what you make of it," said the former executive of American Home Assurance Company. "Retirement is an opportunity to write, out of that I published my book."
Most of the poems comprising 'These Days I Celebrate' were written recently, but a few have spanned a lifetime. One of these, 'Mood At Early Mass' dates from the 1960s, and was one of the first pieces of Mair's poetry that has been published.
'The Jazz Room' was Mair's first published poem. It appeared in The Gleaner in 1961. His writings have been published in The Gleaner, The Observer, Bearing Witness 2002, Bearing Witness 2003, Focus 1983, The Caribbean Poem (1976), and Public Opinion (1969).
Despite this, Mair was very hesitant about publishing his works himself, guided by the idea that self-publishing was still 'vanity' publishing. Fortunately, he was advised otherwise. "I feel so glad about it now in retrospect," Mair says, in response to both having published the book, and its having been well-received.
Now that he is writing full-time, Mair explains that he no longer waits upon the charity of inspiration. "It's not often that one gets these glorious inspirations. But I don't depend on such again, I just face the empty space and start writing."
So while he explains that a few of his poems, such as 'Dream Shall Spin' came to him whole, he is now able to work with a simple line, or phrase or word. These, he says, can be used as "the hook on which you can create and hang a poem".
Mair has also dabbled in theatre. 'The Legacy', which is written in tribute to Derek Walcott, actually reflects an experience when he was involved in Walcott's, In A Fine Castle.
A handsome phrase is not all that Mair is good at. Two handsome Barry Watson water-colours that hang on his wall declare his prowess at table tennis. The trophies were won in a private Watson tournament in 1993 and 1994.
Now that the dream has been allowed to bloom, Mair does not intend to relax in idle fulfilment. Instead, he wants to keep on writing and not just poetry. He is driven by what he describes as an unattainable goal, to have a poem that "will echo even after I'm gone."
