Just Another Manic Monday

When I dropped into bed on Monday night, I looked back on the day with something akin to awe and wonder. Having spent most of the day darting from hospital to hospital, I eventually made my way back home where, in my usual fashion, I fixed dinner for the wife and the sixteen-year-old munchkin. Then Becky said it: "I'm exhausted, and I've got papers to grade, grades to enter, and cookies to bake for a school party."

Then I said it: "Go take a refreshing nap. I'll bake your cookies." And so, I mixed a scratch batch and baked up the three dozen. But realizing I had a few hours to be productive in other ways, I darted into my library between bakings, removed two books, and was able to read two chapters from Kathryn Stockett's new best-selling novel, The Help (a real chick-novel if ever there was one), as well as an early John Updike short story--an epistolary concoction about an African boy who is adopted by an American couple, a story that Updike wrote in his upper-level writing apartment while chain-smoking in his younger days. All this while I baked cookies.

And then, in a sudden burst of inspiration, I fired up Old Sparky, my twelve-year-old writing companion, and in twenty-five minutes I'd written a thousand-word essay that I intend to send to The New Yorker (following some subsequent polishing). The essay, including the title, was EXACTLY 1000 words--a good sign, I thought, almost Biblical in proportion.

And then, on to the stack of mail, where I discovered a rejection from Harper's magazine stashed among the Christmas cards. And a bit later, on the laptop, I discovered another rejection from an editor at West Branch, a literary journal that was looking at some of my essays.

Further down in the email list, however, I discovered an invitation from another editor who was interested in reviewing one of my book proposals. "Sure," he wrote, "send me the proposal. I'd be glad to look at it."

Fantastic. I managed to find the proposal among the harem I have stashed on floppies and hard drives and, for the first time in over a year, re-read my own work from top to bottom. It was flawless, and having forgotten what I'd done twelve months ago, I was actually quite taken with the guy who wrote this junk, my younger-self. And, for a forty-page proposal, it was compelling.

Click. Done . . . . and done. Not a bad evening all things considered.

Now, I wait. But in the meantime, I'll keep baking.