My wife likes to call me Mr. Magoo. Calene claims I wander through life in a state of mild befuddlement, flirting with calamity without knowing. I blame it on the way I arrange my days, traveling from one obsession to another: predawn dreams about the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, straight out of bed to sunrise practice with my runners, then an hour with my novel before putting playtime away and turning my focus to historical research and writing.
Sitting in the cancer ward while Calene gets a PET scan. Not a bad place to write, all things considered — plush chairs, quiet, so-so WiFi. So far this morning I've checked and rechecked stats from Friday's cross country meet, cancelled a trip to London, read the LA Times, and checked my American Express balance. I didn't sleep well last night, doing the 3 am wake-up and not falling back to sleep. Sometimes when this happens and I struggle to find a comfortable sleeping position I remind myself that this is where "toss and turn" comes from.
"You'll never make it."
We were sitting on a taxiway at O'Hare. The guy next to me was a chatty hedge fund manager. Started talking the minute he sat down. In no time at all I had the ear buds in and pulled out my book.
But that was an hour ago in Traverse City. Now, knowing that my connecting flight home was boarding and I needed to hustle from the far end of the F terminal to the far end of the C terminal, I was in go mode. . . .
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….
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.
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.
