A very nice woman named Joan sent me a message on Facebook this morning wishing me luck when I went to see the throat doctor, she didn’t want to lose her “favorite curmudgeon.”

I didn’t think my life was on the line, just my voice, and it was a nice thought. It was in no way offensive, and I didn’t take it that way.

I smiled at the message, Joan couldn’t know that I was first called a curmudgeon by my mother when I was nine years old, I was upset about my Bassett Hound Sam, who kept pushing me out of bed.

“Don’t be such a curmudgeon,” she said. “He’s just a dog.”

A neighbor called me a curmudgeon once after his tree fell over on my fence and front lawn in New Jersey and he hadn’t cleaned it up in six months. “Well,” he humphed, “I didn’t know you were a curmudgeon.”

I’ve been called curmudgeon many times in my life, but oddly enough, not in many years. Until Joan called me one, I wasn’t really sure what it meant.

I’m sorry I looked.

According to Merriam-Webster, it isn’t as affectionate an endearment as I am sure Joan meant it to be. The first definition is “a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man.” The second was “miser.”

Think Scrooge.

Ouch. Was this really me? I go under the general philosophy that everything bad that people say about me is true, the idea is not to get angry but to take a look and see if there is anything to it. That’s how I try to grow.  It’s hard work.

I learn a lot more from criticism than from praise, although I like it a lot less.

“I am an old curmudgeon, and I know it,” said Jonathan Frid. “In a way,” said the brilliant writer V.S. Naipaul, a grumpy and ill-tempered old man,” my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.”

Yet as I thought about it, I wondered if curmudgeon wasn’t just another word used (not by Joan) against older men in the way women who are outspoken and opinionated are often called bitches or worse.
“Women can be irritating,” wrote one aggrieved man, but they cannot be curmudgeon.” This is true, I’ve never heard the word used against a woman, and I have known some grumpy and ill-tempered ones.

I’ve always been wary of labels, I’ve never known them to be helpful or useful, only hurtful and divisive. And I think old talk is especially dangerous and destructive for other people. I believe old talk kills.

So I try very hard not to use those words.

Why do we need them, the idea of the “left” and the “right” seems to me to be poisoning the country. I think labels keep us from seeing the human being, just the idea. I’m reading a wonderful book about an 88-year-old grumpy woman who murders people, and because she is described by others as a “sweet old lady,” nobody ever suspects her of murder.

I  never do old talk or think of me in those terms.

“At our age,” one woman wrote, “I see that young people are never polite.” I wanted to write back and ask her what age had to do with it? When I was a young person, it never occurred to me to be nice to anyone, of any age. There is no “our age.” She cannot speak for me just because I am getting older. We are not all the same.

I think terms like this are often used against men – “curmudgeon,” middle-aged crisis” – to diminish or ridicule those men who are different, or who like to speak their idea of the truth. Or do don’t do what men are supposed to do, have kids and kill themselves working.

In one way or another, people have been labeling me for years.

I refuse to accept labels, they are the antithesis of thought. But most of them aimed at me have had to do with outspokenness and a cranky insistence on independence.

This doesn’t mean I am not a jerk. It doesn’t mean I am a curmudgeon either.

Writing as long as I have, and especially online, I’ve learned that people often say they want to hear the truth, or be made to think, but they frequently hate the people who tell them the truth or make them think. I guess, in that sense, I’ve been a curmudgeon all of my life.

I should say I have never been a “miser,” though, if I had been, I might be richer than I am today.

The irony, oddly enough, people are telling me I’ve changed, and for the better. “You used to be angry,” said one woman posting just below Joan a few notches on Facebook. “You seem to have gotten nicer, and I credit Maria with that.”

Well, thanks. I like to think it is true, and that I had something to do with it. Maria is amazing, but she is not Merlin.

I will ask her when she gets  home from belly dancing tonight if I am a curmudgeon, and if she made me nice. I think that will be a fun conversation.

I remembered this quote by a writer named Lionel Fisher, who had been described by a critic as a curmudgeon.

“Curmudgeons speak up because they have to, because it’s become critically important for them to tell the truth as they see it. Telling the truth is as natural to them once more as it was when they were children. The fact that no one cares to listen is inconsequential. Curmudgeons speak up, raise their voices, stand for something too right to be silent about anymore, whatever the cost, despite a world that deals with what it doesn’t want to hear by crucifying the messenger.”

I have to say I like Fisher’s definition better than Merriam-Webster’s, and I think there is some truth to it, although it’s too noble to describe my own persona and moods. That’s a bit too self-serving to me, I am no saint.

Perhaps I am a curmudgeon. I have been called worse.

I think as I get older, labels seem to make less and less sense to me. I like most of the people I meet, no matter who they voted for.

Honesty is often confused with grumpiness and authenticity often mislabeled as ill-temper. If you are honest, or try to be, you will shed friends like rain off a rooftop, and learn quickly to spend time with yourself. I think there is something natural about that, and I like being alone.

I am also blessed with marrying a person who insists that I am nice. She says I am excitable but even-tempered. I hope that holds up. She would never live with a curmudgeon as the dictionary defines it.

I was sure grumpy this afternoon when I was sucking my new throat medicine up through my nose, and Maria cracked a joke about it. I said I saw nothing funny in the moment. She went off to her studio.

Have I gotten grumpy as I get older? Am I some kind of curmedgeon now?

Is that another thing about myself that I need to face and acknowledge.

The thing is most of my childhood heroes – Clarence Darrow,  Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Elmer Fudd, Buddy Holly,  Froggy (Of The Magic Twanger) Thomas Merton – were grumps.

I saw them as honest, but I might be biased.

In the final analysis, I don’t get to judge myself and decide these things. We are all defined, and inevitably so, by how other people see us: our friends, family, children, spouses, and surely, readers.

The world is a jury, grace is accepting the verdicts.