Benched Week 54: the trap of success

I’ve never seen a downtown as empty on a Sunday night as St. Paul, Minnesota was last night.  It was like the city was asleep in the daylight. And judging by the number of people snoozing in parks, that’s not just a simile.

I started out with high hopes, impressed with an overpass view of the mighty Mississippi.  But the first park was a bust.  It was hotter than I had expected.  Most of the people I passed seemed a bit off.

Just when I was considering calling it a day, I ran into an old friend.

I was an early fan of Peanuts.  When the cartoon strip was converted into television specials, I recorded the music on a reel-to-reel player with a microphone held up to the TV set, so that I could teach myself the music on the piano.  Linus and Lucy, the most recognizable of the melodies, became my signature tune throughout junior high.

Pleased to find Marci on a bench, I sat a while with her and asked her what she was reading.  She was too engrossed to answer.

As the sun created intricate reflections on the buildings above me, I reflected on the price of success.

Charles Schulz was incredibly successful with his characters.  But acclaim can be a trap.  Because of the brilliance of his early years, Schulz stayed with his round-headed kids long past the point when he had fresh things to say.  In my mind, his later years were spent more on cashing in on them than on stretching himself.  Contrast that to Bill Watterson, who walked away from Calvin and Hobbes (and a barge-load of money) because he felt he had done enough with them.  I respect that.  Just as I respect an athlete who knows when to hang up his cleats.  Or flip-flops.



It’s an interesting question: would you rather do one thing well, or dabble in many?  I have chosen the latter – partly by necessity, partly by a deep-seated desire to explore.  It drove me recently to add watercolor crayons into my scribing, and last week, to buy a pricey draw-on monitor so that I can scribe during conference calls. Why stay pat when there’s something exciting just around the bend of the river?

So, when the sun goes down on my career, I think I’d rather be known by the breadth of my work. Hopefully it'll be more than an inch deep in meaning, but definitely a mile wide in scope.  There’s too much fun in the journey to ever fall asleep on the shore.