HOW LUCKY ARE YA. . . .

. . . .when this is the kind of email you get from your Daddy:

Hey Honey,

Just a couple of notes.  First, this chair you and
Ron brought me is just perfect.  I have always liked
to be higher than the keyboard with a back that would
keep me sitting up straight and, together with just
about every adjustment imaginable, this chair fills
the bill.  Mom is using the one you gave me some years
ago.  But this chair figures into a kind of dumb ass
epiphany I seem to have had a few days after the first
of the year.  I didn't get a burst of bright light or
anything of the sort.  But somehow I have recognized
that, no matter how much I vent frustrations  and
mutter imprecations against folks who would have trouble
driving nails into snowbanks, nothing, and I mean
absolutely nothing, is going to change.  Too bad,
you might mutter, that it came when you are within
spitting distance of your seventy fifth year, and I
couldn't agree more.  But there it is.  So I no longer
invent new descriptions for drivers who don't pay
attention to what they're doing nor for cashiers in
stores who talk to one customer for fifteen minutes
about her aunt's operation while the line waits.
But where the chair comes in is that, along with
the realization that my stewing and fuming won't
change anything, also came a very mysterious settlement
in my mind about how to write the novel "______________
_________" that I started in the utility room of the
house on Wyoming Avenue in Fort Pierce.   Same thoughts
occur: why did it take so long? Damned if I know.  But
it did happen, and one of the cardinal rules of
practicality in the writin' game is that you have to
apply your rear end to a chair in front of a keyboard
for large chunks of time. So that's what I've started
to do, and the chair fit right into the sequence of
events.  I have told the other two chillen about this
in a much abbreviated form. Also, I have determined
that, when I finish with the manuscript, whenever that
is, I'm going to go the Print-On-Demand route to
publication, largely because about 99% of book
publishers will not look at a manuscript unless it
comes from an agent.  Think what I might have
been able to do if I had been creative.

Stay loose.

Dad

=================================================

That last statement about being creative is a little
joke between my Daddy and my siblings and at the same
time, a tribute to my Mama.  Yeah, yeah, it's a
paradox.  We're a weird fambly.

Okay here's the sitchyeeashun.  My Mama and my Daddy
were sitting in their great room discussing their
three (most wonderful) children -you can vomit here
if you wish - and my Mama says to my Daddy, who is an
accomplished published writer, mind you, "Honey, I just
marvel at our children and all they can do.  I can't
figure out where they GOT all this creativity.  THEY
MUST'VE GOTTEN THAT FROM ME." :-O