Mighty Nice in Everyday Ramblings

From an atmospheric walk out in heavy fog this morning. A residential neighborhood that is a mixed bag of old houses and new condos and townhouses. An area we’ve not walked in together before though a couple of my students live over there. It is cold out, the fog never cleared, and it is clingy and chills one to the bone. I feel for all those with no place to go to get warm.

Big excitement, I am waiting for a delivery of a couple of 25 lbs. bags of kitty litter, and I need to stay awake. Now with only one cat I order it every three months or so. Quite the luxury that I have the room to store it. I use the recycled paper kind because the cats were trained on it. And as fewer folks are buying newspapers it has been harder to get over the years.

And I can’t abide scented litter. I don’t need it because I am good about cleaning the box and blessedly Carlo has healthy habits.

On Wednesday evening I was lounging around watching the new children’s series on Disney called Percy Jackson and the Olympians and I got a text from Walt asking if I could stay after old guy’s coffee on Thursday and go for tea and conversation about the press he wants to start associated with the nonprofit.

I had a little freakout. I had blurted out at the last board meeting that I was interested in this idea as a direction to head in. And I was like, oh no, he is going to offload things to do on me because I expressed modest enthusiasm, and I just can’t handle one more thing!

This sense of overwhelm is not good for me, not good for my heart. And I was frantically trying to figure out how to respond. I texted back after a time that I would enjoy getting together but not the next day and gave him a couple of less busy for me options. And we settled on yesterday afternoon at a lunch place/coffee house in my neighborhood that I could walk to.

All the time giving myself a pep talk about setting boundaries and clear task assignments and so on and so forth. I even had a pretty new notebook to set up for this. One for Budget, one for Treasurer, one for the Open Road Press. Walt is self-publishing his own book of essays, which is how he got started on this.

I get down there and meet him and we talk about how to get the recording of A Child’s Christmas in Wales out to those who couldn’t make the Zoom and get that squared away and then we start taking about the press.

He tells me what things are costing, where he is getting the money, what he is thinking about in terms of distributing his own book and how things work and sort of what we are doing as a nonprofit in general and then he says, once we get my book through the pipeline and out, I would like to publish a book of yours.

I wasn’t asked to meet with him because he wanted me to do the behind-the-scenes work, (although I am sure I will get roped into some of that) but because he wants to sponsor a book of my work and one other poet’s who he met working in prison, a very talented poet.

How cool is that? What a gift! Even if it never materializes, the fact that he wants to throw the name and reputation of his nonprofit behind my work is so touching. And I don’t have to do a darn thing except, umm, write the darn thing.

It was such a relief and a kind of high that I sort of floated home. What a way to start a holiday vacation. I went from feeling overwhelmed to a bit overstimulated.

Not that I have any illusions about all this. Still, it is mighty nice to be asked.

Mighty nice indeed.