New Beginnings — first draft
“September is for new beginnings,” as the saying goes; however, Thomas Balzac is already late, it being the ides of October this year 2020 at a time the music composer makes his final decision to begin. To begin what? one may ask. The old scribe jokes to himself: “Anything!”
Indeed, Balzac has existed a long time on Earth but has accomplished little, compared to those who have time for “new beginnings.” His new beginning would be a first-beginning, of sorts, he laughs silently.
Silently, because the musician is alone and has been for the past 20 years or more. His memory fails him, lately, but this “new” malady is likely residual effects of his being a long-hauler. Unlike his best childhood friend, Lawrence, who recently called to say he was that week, two years ago, diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s.
He is considering his “new beginnings” plan while sitting on one of the several age-worn wrought iron benches placed by the City of New Orleans inside Cathedral Square. Nuns from the nearby Old Ursuline Convent, located a few blocks away down nearby Chartres Street, are standing to his right, listening to buskers….
The burned-out, failed poet-composer may as well have been a street musician; his ending will be no more important. Both are noble professions — music-composition and street performance — and both are similarly, meagerly, compensated.
Of course there’s the statistical fluke — the fortunate few composers and performers who have embedded their aesthetic mark on the world with just compensation in return — but most are like Balzac: capable but starving, like the portrait and pop artists who display their creations along, and around, Cathedral Square for tourists to buy, though few do.
Most are like the buskers whom Balzac and the group of nuns beside him are listening to at Cathedral Square on a sunny early-winter Sunday….
Whether he “caught” what Lawrence has, or has been re-infected with another dose of the pandemic virus — is of no matter. However, during these past several weeks one thing he does know is that his mind has become easily distracted.
He often doesn’t know what day — or year — it is; and whether he is awake or asleep. He wakes-up in different time periods of his seven-decades-old life, and wonders: “Is this my opportunity to make the changes I regretted not making?”
Were it so easy, to simply go to sleep and correct whatever you regret having done in life. Has the composer found the so-called “Fountain of Youth” with this realization?
But are these conversations real? Were these people, objects and circumstances not “here” only seconds ago? Is it God — or Mammon — speaking to him? he wonders while strolling down Chartres to Esplanade Avenue, passing the Old Ursuline Convent along the way to the bar “dba” where his friend Meschiya is performing.
Many locals in New Orleans were once “street musicians” or buskers, who advanced to the small music clubs originally visited by New Orleans French Quarter “locals” and then, eventually, overrun by tourists, which is another story — contrasting the original jazz music played on “Frenchmen Street” — and that street’s “life” — with the as-unique Dixieland music and people who pack “Bourbon Street” every weekend night pre-pandemic….
NOTE TO READERS (if any):
So this is my approach for a long-winded stream-of-consciousness type series of short stories. “My Kingdom for an Editor” is not a joke. I worked years as a general-assignment reporter for daily newspapers; the job required me to go out and write about whatever story assigned to me by an editor. I never chose my own “stories” — they were the, ultimately, product of the editors.
I just gathered-up the information and wrote the framework; and they did their magic. I always objected when they put my “byline” on the story, because I knew it was a product of these good editors and copyeditors; typesetters even sometimes found errors we professional journalists had overlooked.
Maybe the big boys and gals on the NYT best-seller list and such don’t have editors; lucky them, they are to be admired and richly rewarded (as they are).
But — for me — the so-called fiction writer here, I’m stuck with, basically, typing to myself; just like my protagonist, Balzac the composer, is scribing music notations in the form of operas, fugues, sonatas, etc. — to no one but himself.
Balzac also has no music publisher, having been blackballed decades ago, apparently after the controversy from the Off-Off Broadway opera, “Sodom” which he completed after 10 years of — “literally, blood, sweat and tears!” he cries to his astronomer friend, JB. Both to naught.
The opera was a flop and closed after two weeks; and JB is not listening, he is busy viewing Saturn’s moons traversing the ringed planet (a once in a lifetime event) and sketching every detail onto an artist’s pad laying on the top of a small ladder used to view through the eyepiece of JB’s 10-foot telescope set-up outside Café du Monde.
TO BE CONTINUED (or is this type “story” worth continuing, one wonders?)
“My Kingdom for an Editor”
