A Ferocious Sneeze

Or, The Dark Necessity of Truth-Telling

I really do want to sleep later than 5:30. I’ve half-heartedly committed to getting back together with my CPAP machine. And as happens, too often, I wake up with a ferocious sneeze and throw the mask, and dive for the off button so the rush of air doesn’t continue to wake Andi up. And that is the end of sleep as I know it.

Being married to a person with lifelong allergies and sinus issues is no proverbial picnic. After fifty years of snorts and snot, old man handkerchiefs, and sneezing attacks before sunrise, well, I can see how it might be a marital buzz-kill. We are just two years shy of our 50^th anniversary. I’m hoping we can make it, but if she doses me with poison hemlock in the dark of night, I will understand.

Another week has passed with the tempo of 24 hours and I’m trying to remember what I did with my time. I know I corresponded with two artists with the hope that a word or an idea offered in kindness might have some goodness and efficacy. Both confirmed it had and this made me feel useful. It also affirmed the non-neutrality of ideas, a theme I keep returning to, one I’ve written on quite a bit in the book Andi and I are publishing together.

We turned in our completed manuscript, officially, this week. We planned a daytime date yesterday at the National Museum of African-American Music to break up the week, and keep us from diving into the next set of requirements linked to the book’s release. (If you live in Nashville or visit, put this very well-done museum on your list of must-experiences). We are thrilled with our editor Lisa-Jo Baker, and grateful for assistance from Don Pape, Erin Healy, and Elisa Stanford in getting us to the finish line without too many scrapes and scars. So much more work yet to do, though, and the team at Harper Collins W has a highly-detailed to-do list—which both affirms their mad skills and intimidates the aging, introverted couple (that would be us).   

While Don shops my memoir around (can I just say how much I detest the word memoir at this point?)—apparently, the word has become anathema to publishers—I have accidentally jumped into writing a novel. Something I’ve been planning on since my first attempt during my second attempt at pre-algebra at Yuba City High School in 1971. It was called Blossom, like the James Taylor song. This one doesn’t have a name yet, but I see it finished in my imagination, and that’s usually enough to bring creativity out of the shadows into the light. I have 100 pages and that’s further than I’ve ever achieved before. We’ll see.

So I pray and watch the grey-filtered light of the sun begin to slip through the slats of the blinds. Friday. I’d like to think I could beat Andi at Scrabble tonight. Odds are against it.

I think I’m awake enough to begin work on the novel. Like a musician, backstage before a performance, I warm up. I read a few passages from Barbara Kingsolver’s, The Poisonwood Bible for inspiration and improvise a few riffs to wake mind and body to the work and play ahead. I record them in a word and phrase repository: A person of character and magnetic narrative; the dark necessity of truth-telling and embodying what is actually trustworthy no matter how painful; the political is the personal; it had the ring of excitement and authority.