Waiting for a book to arrive is like waiting for the birth of a baby except the author’s water doesn’t break. The Journal of a Living Lady is finally here and as you read this I will have completed my first official book signing.
Two things I knew by the time I was ten-years-old. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a teacher.
When I was fifteen my father gave me my first typewriter for Christmas. It had a turquoise metal frame and came in a tan leatherette case complete with lock and key. Attached was a note in my father’s scratchy hand, “Write the great American novel.” He didn’t mean just then as I soon found out. He meant when I was grown. Really grown. He assured me I hadn’t lived enough life at the time to produce good writing. “Real living,” he told me, “will give you the experience you need.”
I wish my daddy were here to see this daughter of his signing a book. He would be proud. So would my mother. Maybe they would have been disappointed that my first book wasn’t a novel. Then, again, none of us knew that down the road I would be diagnosed with metastatic cancer.
Life has a way of taking strange turns. Circumstances changed me from being an aspiring fiction writer to a journalist annotating life in the real world. My mother carried yellowed newspaper clippings in her wallet of some of my earlier writing. One was a twelve-line poem dedicated to my parents on my thirteenth birthday. It was gushy and didn’t rhyme well, but my mother kept it until the day she died.
When the UPS man arrived a few days ago with sixteen heavy boxes of books, my heart sang. It was the fulfillment of a goal, not just to write a book and see it published, but to do it before cancer won the war on my body. My other goal, to see Charlie graduate from college, should happen in December. O happy day!
Funny how things turn out. Charlie is writing stories for the newspaper during his summer break. When he gets that college diploma, he will be a certified teacher. I didn’t push him to do either, but the proverbial apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. My son, a writer and a teacher. I gradually pass the baton, but hopefully not the illness.
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