Today, someone asked me how I was doing with my latest book.
I have been working on my second book for over a year. I’m making slow, steady process. And I’m still not sure if it is a book that I am looking to publish or if it is just for me.
So, why write at all?
I guess that’s the ultimate question. Why do we do anything in this world? For me, I want to make a difference; leave the world potentially better off than I came into it. I entered the world during the middle of the Viet Nam War. My father was serving in the Army. He was in Italy and not in Viet Nam, but it was war. He was drafted, so it wasn’t as if he had a choice, and he was all of twenty-one years old. He married my mother two weeks before his twenty-first birthday, and together, they traveled to Italy. I was born soon after.
We were lucky, the three of us, we came home from Italy, the war ended, and we continued on with our lives. Many other people were not as lucky. So, what do I have to write about?
Mostly nothing. By that I mean, I have nothing that identifies me as a writer other than my desire to write and my persistent pursuit of penning pages that are not much more than my own observations of this thing we call life. I believe I join some brilliant minds in that category. Today, on this cold and rainy autumn day in Central New York, I picked up The Book of Delights by Ross Gay and as I read, a smile crossed my face. Reading someone else’s writing can do that. It’s after 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning and if I follow Ross Gay’s lead, I can delight in so many things on this gloomy day: my dogs, who love to curl up on the couch with me as I read or write, making scrambled eggs the way my sister always asked for them (“scrambled eggs with chewy cheese”) , or just the beauty of this time I have to write, wrapped in a Baby Yoda blanket, a sink full of dishes and baskets full of laundry waiting for me to venture back to the path of responsibility.
If you have taken the time to read my words today, thank you. I am truly honored. I hope that today brings you some small delights, or some big ones. And I hope that you write about it.
