Somewhere in my early thirties I was commuting from NJ to Long Island for work. Once, riding with a friend, he asked me if it would be okay if we made a stop in Manhattan. There’s this guy, he said, he’s kind of old, and he could use a hand with a few things. His friend turned out to be Will Barnet, a fairly prominent artist, and he lived at the Art Student’s League building. And he was, as I recall, pushing eighty at the time. The stuff he needed help with was no big deal, really, could you move this into storage for me, it’s too heavy and I can’t pick it up. And he showed us what he was working on, because even at that age, he worked almost every day. I was holding a window a/c unit I’d taken out of his kitchen when he asked me a question. It was an inflection point, a fork in the road. “Tell me, Norman, what do you do?”
I was a facilities engineer at the time, my job was to solve problems, but I didn’t want to go into long boring explanations, so I hefted his a/c unit. “Ah, you know,” I told him. “Stuff like this.”
“No,” he said. “I meant, what do you do for your soul?”
And everything changed.
Where I came from, dreaming was not allowed. Nor was higher education, or pretty much any other form of making something out of yourself. I had escaped, I had scaled the cage walls and gotten away. I had not, however, gotten away clean. At that point in my life, what I knew was that nobody was coming to save me, and if I wanted to survive, I needed to work.
I did have one irrational thought that crept up on me from time to time, one small dream. I loved reading, and I wanted to write. Ridiculous, I told myself. You might as well tell everyone that you want to be an astronaut. But that small dream would not be restrained. It would not leave me alone. So I was not lying when I answered Barnet’s question. “I’m a poet,” I told him. “I write poems.”
“No kidding,” he said. “Next time you come here, I want to see something you’ve written.”
Real men don’t read poems, do they? Let along write them. Forget about showing them around. But he signed a poster for me, and I suppose I thought that meant I owed him. So I picked out something I thought was not too horrible and I copied it down, and a few months later my friend and I stopped in to see him again and I gave him the poem. It was called ‘Step Four.’
He thanked me, and he stood and read it. Then he went off to find his wife and they sat down at a table and read it together. A while later he came back. “Would you sign this for me?”
What?
After that encounter, I looked forward to our occasional visits, and I think he did, too. And he always had something to share. Why do working artists go to galleries? Or to museums? I don’t want to copy anyone, he said But I want to see what they’re doing. And, by the way, have you read Emily Dickinson?
What Barnet actually did for me was, he gave me permission to dream. Here’s this guy, he’s older than I am, his work hangs in museums, and he wants to know if I’m still working. Do I have anything new to show him? Are you working, he said. Not, are you wasting your time pretending to be an astronaut. The message I got was, if Will Barnet takes my ‘work’ as seriously as that, it was about time I did, too.
The pathway from facilities engineer to novelist was not short and it was not easy. I tried to quit more than once, but that itch would not go away, and that small dream would not die. Would I be where I am now without Will Barnet? Absolutamente not. There were others along the way, people who reached out a hand when I did not know how badly I needed the help. I got there, finally, I got published. I can call myself a writer without a trace of imposter syndrome. But I certainly didn’t do it alone. There are no self-made men. Not in my house, anyway.
The point I am trying to make, I think, is that we need each other. We are all, collectively, Sisyphus, and together we have been working on this rock. And if you see some lost dog, be cool. Reach out. You don’t have to set yourself on fire. Just ask. ‘What do you do, for your soul? I wanna see.’