Today is a glorious day, sunny and cloudy and sunny. The storms that besieged us for the last few weeks are behind us, power restored after a few annoying outages. I had my teeth cleaned this morning by our cheerful hygienist and told my teeth were looking well. On my way home from the dentist, after a short walk on the headlands to revel in the sunlit beauty, I stopped at our tiny town library to get a book Marcia wanted, and to my enormous delight found my new book Good With Dogs and Cats: the adventures of Healing Weintraub on the New Books shelf.
I pointed at my book and gurgled, “That’s my book.”
The librarian replied, “We got a request for it, so we bought a copy.”
“Thank you so much,” I said, resisting my impulse to hug her. “I’m thrilled. By the way, the book is set in a mythical version of Mendocino.”
The librarian laughed. “Mendocino is a mythical version of Mendocino.”
“I changed the name of Mendocino to Mercy.”
The librarian rolled her eyes. “If only.”
Continuing homeward, I stopped at the tamale stand and got three scrumptious tamales for eleven dollars – such a deal! – and drove home thinking I made it. My book is in the Mendocino library. And I wasn’t kidding.
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There was a time from 1978 to 2000 when several of my books were in libraries all over America, and I was glad, but not thrilled. Nor did I think I’d made it because those books were in libraries. Indeed, I felt strongly that I had not made it, despite the availability of those books to anyone lucky enough to stumble upon them.
For reasons far too complex (multi-generational, societal, delusional) to spend precious hours writing about, for most of my life I thought making it was to be world famous, to make boatloads of money, to have my books made into movies and my songs recorded by Bonnie Raitt and used as soundtracks for major motion pictures.
Then there came a time (coinciding with my turning 60 and the advent of social media platforms on the internet which I eschew) when no one in the movie business and no one in publishing would even take a peek at my creations. After several years of adjusting to my exile from the mainstream, I embarked on a path of self-publishing and producing my own albums of music with minimal success in terms of sales, but vast success in terms of enjoying the process and feeling I was giving my best to the world, such as I can.
Finding my book in the Mendocino Library today took me back to a moment in 1978 when I was twenty-eight and had just published my first novel Inside Moves. I was standing on a corner in San Francisco waiting for the light to change when I noticed the woman standing next to me reading a book, her eyes wide with delight as she read. Then the light turned green and the woman closed the book so I was able to see the cover. Inside Moves.
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Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub just got two wonderful reviews on Amazon. Success!
