Arrival

The Given Self Has Arrived!


Had a champagne toast the other night after getting my six author copies of The Given Self. It was to be our Tuesday night dinner with Katie, but she’d been out all day (much to my husband’s chagrin) and we woke her from her nap when it was time for dinner (and let her sleep). My brother-in-law Brian, who’s been coming over with his baby daughter Grace while his wife Joyce leads choir practice still dropped by, but first he had to go to a wake and didn’t make dinner. Angie and her boyfriend Christopher, almost always there, decided to watch a movie instead. So it was Donny and Mia and me who toasted.

There’d been a bit of tension earlier in the day. This always seems the way.

When I got home from work the box pf books was sitting on Henry’s yellow stool, and I took one look at it and knew what it was. I had to make a phone call concerning the cause of the tension (dare I say the mind-blowing stress?) and so took the box with me to my sunroom office. I made my phone call. The person I needed to talk with wasn’t in. And so I opened the box.

Isn’t that terribly anti-climactic?

I didn’t show anyone until the dinner-table toast, and at that point had only gotten through the first chapter minus the last paragraph (the phone call I needed to take came).

So there you have it. The book has arrived.

The next day, I called my friend Mary to come over and hid the new books under the blanket I usually keep on the love seat. I’d told my daughter the night before (in the midst of the – what shall I call it – bi-weekly crisis?) that if anyone could get me feeling excited, Mary could. But before I could even think of excitement, I had to talk about the other stuff – thus the hidden books.

Isn’t that the berries?

The only good thing is, The Given Self is a book for just such a time. It’s a book that will tell you to get a life, claim a life, quit being thrown off track by bi-weekly crises. It’s a book that will tell you to take care of yourself (in whatever your own weird way of doing that is). It is a book I wrote because I needed to and it was there when I needed it.