I am fifty-one years old. If I were Shakespeare, I'd have only one summer left - though Shakespeare did not have as much to do to prepare for the unwinding of his mortal coil as I would. He lacked drive-in movies - which I would try to see once more before I went off.
He was not overtaxed with longish trips: I'd want to go to the near-ends of the earth and gaze upon marvels. Sweet Will was a homebody. If I had only this year, I wouldn't come home - second-best bed be damned!

As is likely, however, I will make it another year or two and won't have to worry about cancelling a cellphone plan that isn't scheduled to run out until after my fifty-second birthday. If not, I'm sorry, my dear, to be so thoughtless.

Another very palpable legacy - perhaps the only one - is my artwork, rolling stock that's reasonably well sorted into racks and boxes at my Richmond "studio" - a highfalutin' way to describe a storage closet that had been, on a wing and a prayer, aesthetically upgraded, gussied up, and walled in nicely in order to be pressed into public service as a gallery. The public, however, managed to stay off bad East Grace Street and stuck to the great broad way larger, more elegantly euphonious places have cognated. Broad Street (two words that stand happily alone in
Richmond) has a decent ring, but it ain't Broadway.

I decided to become a full-time painter after having tried it out for a year in Brooklyn, where I was better off outside (I always work on-site) anyway.
This was 1994. My father chose, very fortuitously, to die that summer, and bequeathed me a kind of "initial"
inheritance. His amiable third wife, and my favorite stepmother, was very much alive and would live off the principal of the estate - if I understand the arrangement correctly. With what I considered to be a fairly substantial sum of money, I moved from Brooklyn to Syracuse, New York, where I had a few friends, and began painting soon after I was able to schlepp all of my unstored possessions up three narrow flights of stairs into a wonderful eyrie from which vistas of another broad street were available from both sides of the house. The high ridges of Schiller Park could seen from the balcony. Ah, wilderness!

I "decided" to become a full-time painter because I could - and because I'd given up writing. I couldn't get much of anything published. Double jeapordy: I was unable to finish bigger projects I'd begin, with a wildly inspirational hundred and fifty page kick, over a manic period that rarely exceeded five days. My short stories were, moreover, too long; my essays too meandering; my satire too "broad" - or so said The New Yorker, which seemed to me its most ideal repository.
My several plays continued to get sifted down into the final heat of play competitions and were then tossed aside.

I was not new to painting. I had tried to keep both - painting and writing - on an even keel, and managed a kind of painful lopsidedness, which did not permit any kind of coordinated effort. I'd drop one and do the other. In this way, neither really got done.

So I tossed a coin - or, rather, heaved a typewriter - and came up with the idea of painting instead of writing.

Syracuse was the ideal place for that. I was completely snowed in after the first month I was there. This permitted the sort of full-time schedule flat-footed Brooklyn would not allow, and I must admit I thrived. I shopped with the lonely man's appetite for disposable things, and fed depressive genes with starches. For the most part, I was so enraptured with my new-found freedom that the habitual circuitry did not fire. My god was ecstatic and had no ear for Irish notions of despairing loneliness. My loneliness
- if it be that - was dedicated to an old work ethic my Germanic forefathers had bequeathed to its dour progency and passed onto my own father, who mistrusted joy - unless it could be had with some sort of male
bonding ritual.

My Syracuse routine was as simple as it was rigid. I got up early in the morning and started painting.
When it got to be dark, I ate a little something and painted until it occurred to me that I should slog off to bed. The old man who owned the building liked to have fun with me, a "downstater" who couldn't possibly know what ten inches of snow was like, and wove a few tall ones about impassable streets and men not finding their way home on their own block and freezing to a lamppost. Having seen the snowplows and the salt-houses and all the other winter paraphenalia most other cities manage to do without, I was confident that even lost old men could grope their way to a doorbell and lean against it if they had to. In fact, Syracuse's snow management skills are second to none.
I never heard of anyone ever getting stranded there - or getting cold, for that matter. Syracusans were (and remain) sensible people who knew how to make themselves comfortable. And did.

By degrees, as it were, I became the isolate most Syracusans, with their arcane social networks and neighborhood taverns, hardly ever become. The old man was frequently the only person I would talk with for days at a time. His youngish wife gave me a tour of their second-floor apartment once because she thought she had a knack for painting and wanted me to appraise her work - which is to say, she wanted me to come around and pronounce her a genuius. When I failed to become delirious in the face of her night-school attempts at idealized landscape and petunia-in-a-bottle still life, I was dropped from the social register. "What does he know?" I'm sure she'd asked the husband, who had, wisely, kept his counsel about those lousy paintings.

I had a sort of blowout after a trip to Memphis and broke with my old routines. I wasn't interested in working for the long, leaden months of December and January, but began to bounce back in February, and was all right again by March. At that time, I met a woman at a bookstore. Being neither young nor reckless, but merely tied somewhat daffily to the present, we lost no time moving in together. By that summer, we were commmuting out to her hardscrabble little property in the Alleghenies where I would look out at the low mountain ranges in wild surmise and wonder how it was possible to have ever been in Brooklyn. I painted there too. From her mid-Nineteenth-century farmhouse, I turned to field and wood, but came back to the man-made subjects that most interested me: a tub-shaped Ford truck, ramshackle outbuildings, the wasp-overtaken attic I reached by a flight of stairs so narrow I instinctively bottled my shoulders walking up them. Andrew Wyeth knew such stairs intimately. I almost felt an intruder into territory already claimed
by a more forceful talent.

I resumed my old routines from her smallish house, even after I ran out of money. She was overcommitted to my artistic development and did not pressure me to get any sort of job - though I would go off on a money tangent from time to time with a recovering alcoholic who'd - against form - become a housepainter after he'd taken AA vows and gone on the wagon. He became an on-again, off-again houseguest in an attempt to flee a girlfriend who might bean him one day and steal all of his money the next. If he liked you, he'd call
you "Rabbinowitz".

After another winter, she and I decided we should move and set out to see the Eastern Shore, where the yearly snowfall did not make headlines; if necessary, we might be able to put up a tent somewhere as we trolled about for a place to live. But no such luck. A storm came up and drove us landward - toward Richmond, Virginia, as it turned out. I decided to have a "eureka" experience as we exited 64 and found a funky little enclave full of drowsy people and houseplants that had somehow proliferated into monstrous, fruit-heavy, mythic-sized trees, shrubs, and vines. I breathed it all in and, well, it was "eureka" all over again.

We found a realtor and gave him instructions to find us something cheap and ugly, preferably in a place called The Fan, named for its sudden taper as peripheral areas pressed in on it. The realtor sent us a video of a place that had somehow escaped the house police and was still on the market at around fifty thousand - outlandishly cheap even in that pre-gentrified era. We took it and moved in. And, once, again, I went back to my old routines.

We broke up some years later because of a romantic contretemps that shouldn't have really driven us apart, since our relationship had become essentially platonic. But I was for some reason skittish about it and talked gorgeously around the whole thing. I ended up with the house for some months myself - a dust-moted place largely airless, and hot as a stove-lid during the final months of its vacancy.

By that time, I'd had a great many exhibits, both of my own and others' devising, and seemed to be on my way to a solid career - or at least as solid as a career in painting could be. We'd blown into town as free-booting outsiders and remained fully on the periphery of Richmond society. She scared people with her notions of progress and equality. She embraced everyone equally - a no-no in such a stratified world as Richmond can be. The well-heeled folk didn't like to see her giving homeless people soft drinks. The people she worked with found her daft sense of inclusiveness infuriating. I think even some of the homeless people didn't like her making up to certain other homeless people. For my part, I made people nervous with my darting movements; my intense, if misguided, dedication to the notion of a professional life; and lack of interest in the local brahmins - except as interesting intellectual properties. I made fun of people mercilessly, but democratically. People in the South can be touchy and don't like you laughing either at, or with, them - unless they make the joke first and laugh for a long time before you do.

Since that time, I've been in my "old" studio, a fine old building the tenants neither markedly improve nor significantly worsen. I opened it up as a gallery, which, as I've said, was not well-attended. All that time, however, I had been fitfully productive and now have an estate it would be very hard to disperse quickly - even if everybody I knew were to come in SUV's and haul the stuff away armfuls at a time.

And, now, over ten years after having left Brooklyn and left my longish stories, three-character plays, and eccentric humor in file drawers, I'm ready to go back to writing. It is hardly unusual to have forty or fifty-years - Gulley Jimson's while-away time - to fool around with doing one thing, but I seem to be cyclical sort who needs to abjure and embrace; whose creative juices are stirred now and then by breaking off, or away, from something. And so it appears to be time to give up painting - which has given me a decent, if worrisome, sort of living for a number of years - and go back to the thing I'd dropped, somewhat ignominiously, both because I'd had it - and, again, because I could.

It is both exciting and melancholy to make big changes. You weigh what you're losing against what you fervently hope to gain. You reflect on missed opportunities and miscalculated adventures. You develop "ifitis": if I'd been in another place; if I were another sort of person; if I'd been able not to burn bridges at this moment and maybe waited a while.
I would pronounce my post-midlife switch-over as a melancholy one. At this point I will not paint a new picture lest it get embroiled in yet another misadventure with a dealer, curator, buyer, or any other person who might express a half-hearted that will die; a momentary enthusiasm something else will divert; a genuine, if fleeting, interest that vanishes the next day. And this is not even to address the politics of the matter, which are most wearisome when you're the sort of outsider I am. The definition of the outsider is, for me, someone whose connections have a negative charge.

I received the cue I needed the other day when I ran into a young lady who was painting out on the Mall here in Washington. Her picture was conventional, but arresting, and I could see, in her, myself those ten years ago, when I was full of fire and enthusiasm, couldn't wait to get "out there" again, and wanted, genuinely, to share what I did with people who were willing to give it a good, honest look. She'll go on to paint for years and years. I can only hope my writing will catch fire the way my painting did those
ten years ago. And I do. I really do hope now.