As good as it gets

The Given Self, my new book, is now available.

I am very tired today. Almost tired enough to be brain-dead and mushy in that way that begins to feel a little profound. Almost.

We had our first snow of consequence start up just about the time I left for work. The elderly gentleman I companion thought it best that we go out for groceries. A blizzard was predicted. The weather is exaggerated as much as the rest of the news, but still, the driving conditions were not optimal and my client’s nerves got on my nerves. Just try driving an older person through the snow or shopping with them when you’ve got to look for the sodium count on every package and you’ll get a front seat view of frustration and have to try pretty hard not to let it be your own.

But oh how like my client I am, deciding I must stop at the grocery store myself on the way home. I’ve got cookie baking on the brain. The perfect thing to do on my day off (tomorrow) two weeks or so before Christmas – right? I actually do like to bake cookies. No one is twisting my arm. I just like to have everything ready in advance. A snowy day, a warm oven, time to putter with cookies at my own pace. Sounds good to me. So I go to the store, forget one thing, as I always do … which I realize as I start chopping nuts and crushing graham crackers. Damn.

Get done with that, do up the dishes, and come to sit down feeling as if I ought to post something – or do something, anything – book related.

I’ve been toying with the idea of putting announcements of The Given Self in with my Christmas cards but it feels kind of smarmy. Like a lot of people I know, my Christmas card sending has dwindled down to almost nothing the last few years. It started the year my dad was dying. I helped him write a few but didn’t get out my own. The next year, I was feeling really conscientious about sending them to his relations. So many of them had been so good to us (that’s the way it got to feel – as if those who visited, helped, supported Dad were supporting “us” – my siblings and me), and keeping that connection felt like something Dad would want me to do. I got those out and few others. That’s the way it’s been going. That dwindling.

One of the strange things about having a book come out just before Christmas is the time element. You think it might be great…at first. I had one friend tell me she’s planning to give the book to five or six women she exchanges with, but other than that, people appear, for the most part, too busy to care. Or maybe that’s me.

So the book launch is scheduled for January. (January 7, 7 pm, Harmar Barnes & Noble in case you’re wondering.) You wait and hope it won’t be 30 degrees below zero or snowing, or with a blizzard predicted. You hope people will get in one of those new year moods when they want to do something for themselves and you hope your book might be the one they choose to gift themselves with. I had a friend who ordered it on-line write me that it got him through a bad night recently. That’s about as good as it gets.