COACH CAREGIVER
I surprised absolutely nobody yesterday when I tweeted that I am going to continue coaching. It's been almost eighteen months since Calene was diagnosed with a rare cancer. You never know what's going to happen with a Stage IV situation. So as we got used to waiting rooms filled with other cancer patients and the wonderful nurses administering chemo, it just made sense to step away from anything that prevented me from focusing on getting her better….
THE NOTEBOOK
Flying home from Oahu.
I'm on the aisle. Callie has the window, eyes closed, wrapped in a blue United blanket. Somewhere in my carry-on is the notebook I bought in Edinburgh ten or so years ago. I can't remember which book I was researching. Might have been Killing Kennedy, but it was definitely a Killing book. Between 2010 and 2020 I didn't write anything else.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my copy editor, I have learned that I am fond of using a dangling modifying phrase. I did not know this. In fact, I will admit that I have no idea what constitutes a dangling modifying phrase. I was never good at diagramming sentences. There's a myth out there that writers are master grammarians, but I think the truth is that most of us stumbled upon this career because we like to read, do not play well with others, and quietly wondered what it would be like to live the writing life.
RESTLESS SOUL
The journey from Orange County to Mammoth is an empty speedway at 6 a.m. I made it up here in five hours despite a short freeway shutdown and a stop for Starbuck's in Adelanto. The family condo is a great place for solitude and writing but I'm in a restless mood so I've spent most of the past two days running, hiking, and finding a spot in town to sit alone in the shade and read. Distant Brewing worked just fine.
EXCOMMUNICADO
AIRBNB
If I were in the Netherlands right now, as I thought I might be this weekend, I would be driving my rental car back to Brussels from a venue known as Megaland in the Netherlands. It's right next to Aachen, the first portal into Germany for the US Army in 1945. My ears would be ringing from a Bruce Springsteen show almost four hours in length. The euphoria would linger.
