Week 2 of 29: Old Friends and New Friends

The first full week on the Cape has gone differently from what I expected when I was planning this writing retreat. I thought I would be able to just take a couple of days to get set up, and then get into the groove of writing right away. That’s not been the case at all, in part because of the extraordinary events of my last weekend at First Parish. I learned of Butch Redding’s first stroke Saturday, February 9, just a few hours before the farewell dinner celebrating the work First Parish and I had done together that had been planned from weeks before. During the dinner, I got a frantic call from a friend from my New York days. I found out the following morning that her 27-year-old son died unexpectedly, probably due to some combination of painkillers and preventative medications he was on.

My friend’s son’s funeral was this past Tuesday. As I was on a bus lay-over in Providence, I talked to Millie and got the word of Butch’s imminent death, which was later that same night.

So I’ve been talking with a number of old friends these days: Two old friends in New York about putting me up for the Tuesday night I was there; my friend who lost her son; friends from and friends of First Parish regarding Butch’s passing.

At the same time, I’m grateful to be making some new friends out here on the Cape. My writing colleague and I are finding ways of working together and supporting each other on our respective projects, and I’ve been blessed to make some new friends here in Provincetown and Truro who have been generous with their time and hospitality, and have shown me some new sights and gotten me oriented to this part of the world. I’m truly glad for the gift of friendship.

Despite my intention to be somewhat regimented and focused here right off the bat, my soul seems to be saying, “Slow down – I need a breather!” I’m accepting that I must have needed more unstructured time to transition from the Boston area to being out here.

I’m enjoying the quiet and the slower pace. I can look out the window to the street that’s two backyards away and see a vehicle passing by every now and then. It’s different from the moderate busyness of Arlington Center and the unrelenting busyness that a got reacquainted with briefly while I was in Manhattan last week.

The busyness I am getting most acquainted with is that within my own mind. I remember being at a talk back in the fall given by Barbara Brown Taylor, the author of Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith. That evening, she was talking about the concept of sabbatical, and it’s erosion over the generations and decades. During the Q&A time following her talk, I mentioned my own sabbatical, and asked what her advice would be for me as one taking his first leave. She acknowledged that she didn’t know me, but that during my leave, I would become intimately acquainted with what drives me.

That’s what I’ve been paying attention to as much as anything this past week. I’m looking and seeing a lot of motivation emerging out of anxiety. It’s something like, “You better (fill in the blank), because if you don’t, something bad will happen.” Or I find myself avoiding doing something that I am doubtful will turn out in a way that I would expect and like.

Confronted with the task of finishing a novel, I am reminded of what it was like for me 30 or so years ago when I stopped practicing piano. I couldn’t bear to be with my beginner’s status, my place as a novice, especially when I knew other people my same age or younger who were much further along. What if I wasn’t any good, and would never be any good, as a musician? Rather than stay with that question and continuing to play, I stopped playing all together. Now when I reflect, I wonder what my life might have been like had I continued to practice. It’s never to late to start, it’s true, but there’s a way in which the past 30 years of not practicing can ever be regained. Not having a written a novel myself, I keep thinking about the masterworks of Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee, D.H. Lawrence, Alice Walker, James Baldwin and so many others, and coming up short. In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron notes that emerging artists don’t compare their work to the beginning work of they favorite artists, but to the published works of masters of their craft.

I see the unfinished novel as an old friend who has been lounging on the couch watching television, while the finished novel is a new friend who is ringing on the doorbell, excitedly trying to enter my life. Will I continue to comfortably hang out with the unfinished, or will I muster the strength, courage and hope to get up, open the door and let the finished in?

(c) 2008 by Carlton Elliott Smith. All rights reserved.