Determination

Cabbage—the first word put down with his new pen, a trophy pen, like a trophy wife, not cheap, absurd to use a ballpoint pen for a task like this, a challenge, for which he’d also bought a new, but antique, rolltop desk recently restored, with matching chair, also not cheap, and for which he’d renovated the attic room with pine-paneled walls, bookshelves, and a good light for his new office or weekend office, a place planned for many years, even before college, back in high school in fact, a resolve rare in his life, but about which he’d dreamed in free moments at work, and which kept him sane during those tedious years of doing the taxes for strangers, but now at last begun, excitingly begun, as he leaned forward with pen raised to put down on paper the first word of his first novel.