Thursday, November 30, 2006

Day #75: Thursday, Nov. 30: Time To Go

It's been 75 great days in Cracow. The Poles are great people. Cracow is a great city. The denizens of the Villa Decius Guesthouse were great writers, interesting people and I hope they will remain good friends.

A few of us who were left - Erica, Tanja, Katja and her friend Katja - sat around in the Gosopda restaurant last night and discussed whether we had accomplished what we had set out to acccomplish.

The goals were wildly different: Erica finished her book but did not "finish" learning Polish; Katja did some writing and did not "find herself," but she almost did. Tanja just plain didn't want to leave.


And me? Did I accomplish anything here? I didn't finish my great renaissance novel, but I did sold two books, one of which is a comic novel, I finished the website and there was something else strange that happened. Spending 75 days surrounded by writers who take their work but not necessarily themselves very seriously, I began looking at myself a little bit differently too. Can't really say how. And no one else noticed it, I think, but I did.

Late last night around 1 a.m., I put on my headphones, found Bob Dylan's latest record on my iPod, cranked it up and wandered outside into the damp, deserted dark. I danced. Through the parking lot, around the Villa, into the park and around it, through the sculpture garden and back home. Don't know why i did that. Haven't ever done it before and will never did it again. But let me tell you: If you've never played air guitar in the dark in the fog in the middle of the night alone in the park behind the Villa Decius, you haven't lived.

Time to go.

No comments: