What To Do?

The mellow glow of satisfaction is almost palpable.  The garden is perfectly pruned, manicured, the tiny new leaves on the roses and peonies signal all the beautiful blossoms just waiting to burst forth.  The items on my desk are now all neatly stowed, the magazines on the side table of my reading chair are arranged title by title, the to-do list of bills to be paid, letters to be written has dwindled to nothing.  I have been north not even two weeks and I have everything in order.  Now what?  A terrible emptiness, like a wave surging on the beach, sweeps in, and leaves me vacant, motionless in my chair.  Now what?  I need a project.  Two years ago I was making the last changes to a manuscript which was about to be published, last year I was preparing for the October publication.  Now what?  I keep making notes for a novel that I would love to write.  Why don't you?  I have so far in my life written four novels, none of them ever published.  My story will never be that of the unrecognized genius with his novel gathering dust in the closet.  No, I have many, many friends in the publishing industry, and over the years have the very great fortune of getting my manuscripts read, and I have had the luxury of receiving honest criticism from my friends.  So these manuscripts remain unpublished, and serve as a stern reminder that it does not look like I have the talent for writing fiction (although several years ago when the industry was not in such desperate shape one publisher friend did say of one of my pieces "If you keep sending it around long enough, you probably will find somebody somewhere who will take this on.  It isn't that bad.")  Self publishing is the way to go, I hear on every side.  But do I really care that much?  I toy with writing this novel I have more or less worked out in my head as an exercise.  Who cares if it is read?  Who cares if it gets published?  True, true.  Another voice within my head, a sterner critic reminds me all too crisply that the fantasy story hews so closely to a true life experience that maybe it has been dealt with sufficiently in my memoir.  That leads me to another fantasy of writing some episodes from my life fully disclosed in the memoir with the major details of the narrative radically altered, making a kind of Rashomon version of my life story.  That might be amusing.  For a day?  A week?  I need a real project, like going every day to work in a soup kitchen, but they don't seem to have such things in the small beach town where I live.  I had a very dear close friend who died last summer at 97 with whom I spoke almost daily for fifty years, and because we were resolutely intimate and honest in our conversations I had the sad privilege of bearing witness to the long, slow windup--or should I say rundown?--of her life.  When she retired, she bought a small printing press, and began to turn out exquisite hand made books of infinite delight and impeccable quality, and then she grew slower at that and the inspiration became scantier, and the contacts fewer, and she would complain to me sighing.  "Oh, Charles, I need a project."