The cold, the dark, the business, the unexpected sadness. That would be February!
Hello again, gentle readers! Thank you for your patience as I took weeks away to work on my February assignments. First of all, my minister let me know I’ll be preaching one Sunday in June and three in July, and as soon as I get my dates I start in right away composing sermons and orders of service. Once they’re all written and saved to two separate flash drives (one of which is kept in a fire-proof safe!) I can relax and focus on other things, like my exceedingly dusty house or my current manuscript, The Magdalene Poems. I haven’t stopped getting ideas for poems for the new collection, but I have had zero time to write them down. Now I do, and will. And just the idea pleases me very much!
On the 17th, I was involved in a bit of subterfuge regarding my publisher, Marty Gervais. He learned from the internet (and was none too pleased about it) that there was going to be a celebration for Black Moss Press at a local bookstore where several of us Black Mossers would give a reading. Marty kept telling the organizers – “I don’t remember scheduling this!” – but they all smiled, told him it was one of the inevitable signs of old age, and just relax, they’d take care of everything. The reading though, was a ruse to get Marty in the store so he could receive the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for outstanding service to the community. We were all sworn to secrecy, and on the night of the presentation I asked one of the organizers if he was still in the dark.
“Well, he was still complaining today about how tired he was, so I’m thinking that’s a pretty good sign he doesn’t know.”
And he didn’t. The look on his face when the cat was let out of the bag – priceless! Any fatigue he might have been experiencing turned to joyful excitement. But we still did a reading, including Marty, who got his grandson to read one of granddad’s poems to the delight of the audience.
It was a lovely evening, but as I told the crowd, if we had had to keep that secret much longer, I was afraid all our heads were going to explode!
(More later!)
