Fresh Start

It feels like a good time to start fresh on some new things. I am wondering right now why baggage is so necessary to haul around in so many situations and so hard to get rid of, too.

When my father died suddenly back in February, for several months afterward I found myself breaking into tears at odd times and with no reasonable explanation for the timing. My dad had been a tremendous influence on my life, in both positive and negative ways, and was just becoming something altogether different within our context: a happy old Grampa to my two kids and a father who sometimes voiced regrets about the past, asking me with a new calm vitality not to make some of the same mistakes he had.

Before he died, I had not told my dad about the Writer-in-Service Residency that I had been awarded by the Lillian E. Smith Foundation, which has recently given me two weeks of uncluttered time to write. I was working on and finished my “Alabama book,” as I had been calling it, ever unsure of its actual title, which I now know: You Can’t Know Where You’re Going (When There’s Something in Your I). Residencies and fellowships are hard to explain to people who do not have careers in the arts, and Lillian Smith, the foundation and the center would have been even harder to explain to a man like my father, who was ever the conservative Southerner. I had planned on getting around to explaining it one day, before I left for Georgia, but that didn’t happen before he left for good.

After spending the last several years devoted to projects that centered on my home state, my life-long place of residence, my “Alabama book” is the last one . . . and now it’s done, too. The 94,000 words or so that the first draft has ended up may constitute a little more or a little less than what the finished book will have, if it ever sees light of day. Seeing my dad’s life come to an end, and now seeing this project on Alabama wrapped up . . . I barely even care right now if the book ends up being published. I have made peace with both of these bugbears – my father and my home state of Alabama – that have haunted me unmercifully and that occupied my imagination for a long time.

I guess I’ll see my old man again if our lives lead us to the same place after mine is done, too. Although I do still miss him, I’m in no hurry to see him just yet. I’ve got a few folks that need me to stick around for a while longer, and they're pretty powerful reasons to keep on truckin'.

As for Alabama, y’all go on ahead without me. I might catch up to you later. Depends on what else is going on.

It’s time to do something else.