A Second Chance at a Freelance Life

The last time I launched a "freelance career" was nearly 25 years ago. By most measures of success, it didn't go that well.

It is true that when I got a writing or a photography assignment, I met interesting people who apparently appreciated my accommodating southern manners. I always returned with a good story or revealing photograph. In fact, Walker Percy, a southern writer of some reputation, once called me a "painless" photographer. The description fits, but I have often wondered if Walker really meant it as a complement. After all, Southern "niceness" and gentility are often nothing more than a soothing, numbing shield from responsibility or worse an excuse for cowardice.

In any case, I was living south of San Francisco in a small walk-up one bedroom apartment right on El Camino Real in the moderate to well-healed town of Burlingame. In fact, for a first try at the California rental market, the apartment was, in the lexicon of most women, nothing short of "cute."

The apartment was comfortable and clean, but I thought of the apartment's Mediterranean, sky-blue trim and off-white facade as a colorful billboard sign pointing the way to a new, purposed-filled life. In fact, as I watched two burly men carry my oak desk up two flights of external switchback wooden stairs and disappear through an open door at the top, the thought that something, anything, could go wrong was as foreign a concept to me as dying or falling out of love.