Gifts

I am the recipient of gifts: too many, none of them earned.

Yesterday, for example, in the airport: a young girl from Penn State who, like me, waited for that ersatz plane to San Antonio. She was beautiful—dark haired, a diamond chip on the left flare of her nose, a tender kind of edgy. Studying Spanish, dreams of becoming a translator, a good sort. I liked talking with her. We made a pact. We said, If we hear again that the plane that is about to take us high in the blue cold sky (the plane that was so tiny that it had no overhead luggage compartments) needs "more" maintenance (after already waiting a long time for maintenance) then we will be officially spooked. We got word. We were, together, spooked. She went her way and I went mine, but I felt as if, during all that waiting, I had made a friend.

Another gift: Dina Sherman of HarperCollins was kind beyond description about my airport dilemma. She understood. I am an uber responsible, don't let people down if I can possibly help it sort, and I never not show up for things; it's against my annoyingly obsessive nature. Dina made it okay for me to go home during the swamp of airline confusion.

Another gift: A few days ago, Vivian of Hip Writer Mama took the time to lay out, step by step, just how one embeds links in a blog. I had no idea previously how this got done. I don't know how anyone learns this stuff in the first place. But I know that it took Vivian a long time to teach me, and this was after she had already gone the distance, interviewing me and three others for last week's Winter Blog Tour. She's something else.

Another gift: Jane Satterfield, whose beautiful, searing memoir, Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond, is due out next year, sent, arriving just today, a book of poems by Elizabeth Spires. It's called The Wave-Maker and Jane's generosity is inexplicable (except that Jane, whom I profiled not long ago on this blog, has always been enormously generous). Jane's taste is immaculate. I've been sitting with this book for the past half hour and I think I'm in love with every page. I wonder if Ms. Spires would mind me quoting a stretch from a single poem called "Translation of My Life":

Imagine: a town
in the same universe as this one,
with the same physical laws,
but no poets, no poetry.
No scribbling hands up late
at night writing words
they believed would save them.
No noisy fluttering pages
to disturb the peace
of a dreaming populace.

I hope not.