It’s one of
those days. Started with a visual field
test, involving dots dashing here and there, of which I saw only a few, not
enough, and which sent me into “What if I’m going blind?
This thought
led me into an “I’d-better-get-all-of -my to-do’s-done-in case-I-can’t-read -my-list
-a -few-weeks-from-now” flurry. So I sat
down, sent out press releases, edited the next few pages of my novel, decided its
title will be, maybe, “Finding Our Husbands,” ordered three or four outfits
from Lands End for our March trip to Florida, reminded my found husband that we
needed a couple of hotel reservations for that trip, and cleaned the silver
napkin rings for the charity dinner we’ll be having here soon. Then I dumped
the filled wastebaskets and recycled the week’s newspaper. My checked-off list of ToDo’s had only a couple
items left on it, impossible items like “walk two miles today.”
Then I set
the list aside, had a glass of wine, and watched the PBS News Hour. Life began to settle into a different
perspective: Syria, Iran, an exhausted
President, deadly fires, and so on. Not being able to see the flicking dots on
an electronic machine didn’t seem quite as important after seeing the hopeless
look in the eyes of a starving child. At least a diagnostic machine had existed
for me. At least I saw a few of those
dots. At least, after the dots’ flickering challenge, I could come home and
attend to my list.
And think.
Amazing
what the threat of blindness and a reality check can do rearrange one’s outlook.
For the past two years, Graffiti Grandma what my life has been all
about. I have sold maybe 200 copies, made a few hundred dollars, had a few
people tell me they liked it. I’ve had great reviews, and made new friends, and
felt the support of old friends. I’ve been asked to read and to speak about my
novel and the process of publishing it. I’ve blogged and essayed and offered
myself to radio interviewers in vain efforts to become known, both me and my
book.
The word “vain”
lashes out at me. I count the I’s in the last paragraph, the I’s in this blog.
Writing
teachers advise that characters in novels shouldn’t suddenly have epiphanies to
clear up their troubled lives and the author’s plot. Well, in real life, epiphanies do happen. I
believe I’m having one right now. It
seems to me that I have stepped into a fog bank of self-centeredness that has shut
me off from most everything that used to be important to me; compassion,
friendship, love, joy. A self-centered view has closed off the broad view lying
just beyond the fog. I haven’t been
seeing most of the dots for a long time.
So, this is
my last message to my readers who have remained faithful. Graffiti
Grandma is published. Finished. I am not.
I’ll still keep writing, but I’ll also step out of the fog, enter the
life around me, write different ToDo lists that will allow me to reach out to
others. Don’t know what this actually
means, but I’m thinking my dots will be visible.