Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Pardon the Interruption

Hush!  Be quiet. Don't bother me while I'm reading. All right! All right! Just let me finish this paragraph.

Now. You have my full attention. But wait. Before you start, let me tell you about the book I'm reading.

It's called Still Life with Bread Crumbs and I love it. I love the sheer act of reading it. It delights me, even though I haven't gotten very far into it - only about twenty percent according to my Kindle, which was a present (and the best present I ever received) from the love of my life who recently died.

The book was written by Anna Quindlen. It's a story about a woman who's famous - or was once, but now she's strapped for cash. She wants to get away, to write a book, so she rents a cottage - well, it's more like a cabin - a rundown cabin in the woods somewhere. She meets a man and falls in love. I think she falls in love. I'm not that far enough into the book yet to know - but I love it.

In one scene she sees him with a gun, getting ready to shoot a bald eagle so she makes a lot of noise to scare the eagle away. Only it 's not a gun and he's not a hunter. He explains that it's a tracking device and that he works on weekends keeping track of the eagle's habits for the scientists he works for. She gets embarrassed and he tells her not to worry. The eagle, he says, will come back soon because it has a mate in a nest nearby. "He'll be back. He always is," he says.

"The same bird in the same location?" she asks.

And then he answers with a line I love: "They mate for life... Unlike people."

All right now. What was it you wanted? Oh, right. Now it's my turn to be embarrassed, I think as I glance at the clock on my dashboard.  It's time for me to put this school bus into gear and start my morning run. All right. Thanks, Nick. I'm off.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

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