Lisana's Lines

My friend Stephen Bazzell posted on his Facebook on Monday, “If you are in this life for the money, or the fame ... All you will have left is a pretty grave.”

Bazzell was in a regionally well-known band in Atlanta until he recently relocated to the Baltimore area where he joined another band. He posted this from a truck stop restaurant on Memorial Day where he noticed that all of the other diners, like he, were alone. He assumed they were all thinking the same as he was: How did we get here, 1,000 miles away from our families on a holiday.

Assumedly, the truckers were working to take home money to their families and I know that Stephen was headed back to Baltimore from Atlanta to work and to chase the rock and roll dream.

This got me thinking; I like to think that there has to be a happy medium somewhere and that maybe it is inherent in our nature to want something big.

I am out here on my own; 1,300 miles away from everything that is dear to me. I came here for this job, my dream job of being a reporter at a newspaper and I love my job. And as a reporter, I dream of someday breaking that one big story that will gain national attention.

I also have both the play/musical and film screenplay that I have been writing for a while and I hope to one day sell them to not only make a name for myself but to also secure mine and my son’s futures. When those writings make me famous, I will then publish my book of poems that have been ready to publish for quite some time. I won’t publish those yet because maybe I fear failure in selling many books because no one will know who this poet is.

I want to be known for my writing and I want to have a comfortable future. But to me it is equally important to make a difference in someone’s life with my writing, wherever I am. If I can make a positive difference somewhere, that to me is success.

When I think of two of my distant cousins who I was never able to meet, Elvis Presley and James Dickey (poet and author of the book “Deliverance” that the film was based on), I wonder if they set out to be famous; or if it just happened along the way. Maybe it was something that was inherent in their nature, like maybe it is in mine.

I do know that the need to write, for me, is like a wound that can only be healed by putting words on paper.

One of my favorite things written by George Gordon, Lord Byron speaks volumes: “But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.” From Don Juan, Canto III Stanza 88.