Sold two “Pirates and the Mouse,” which was pleasing, but the logistics proved a bit daunting.
I had received a call from a fellow I knew 15 years ago when we both were lawyers. He had found a copy, which he’d bought but never read, on his shelf and enjoyed it so much he wanted to give copies to friends. But his daily radiation treatments for prostate cancer ruled out coffee or lunch, which is usually how I do business. He invited Adele and I for dinner, but that ran afoul of us not having had dinner at another couple’s home in about two decades, as well as Adele’s disinclination to socialize in any form.
When he realized Memorial Day meant he would not have treatment, he invited me to his house for lunch. Only he gave me incorrect directions which, combined with my notoriously bad sense of direction, had me zipping off and on Rte 13 and making u-turns on narrow winding roads in the Oakland hills, so that it took me twice as long to arrive as Google had estimated.
Lunch itself was nice. Law “war stories” were exchanged. Books were signed and compensation had. But I was so wiped when I got home, it underscored for me how uncomfortable I am outside my home-cafe-home bubble.
So I e-mailed the Alameda County jury commissioner I would not be showing up for duty as I had been summoned to do.
I also had a couple in-café conversations of note.
One was with the retired public defender to whom I had given a “Schiz.” He confessed he had to quit reading it. “Too much like the cases I handled, and I’m trying to forget all that.”
I appreciated the response. Honest – and surprising, as anyone who’s read the back cover blurbs would know.
The second was from a grey-haired woman in black-and-white sun dress and matching sun hat. She said she had lived nearby for 40 years and was walking around the neighborhood, reacquainting herself with it before moving to Atlanta to live with her son. She declined to buy a book as a souvenir because everything she was taking with her had to fit in a dufflebag.
“Is Atlanta permanent” I said.
“It depends,” she said. “My son teaches Latin, and whenever his school drops Latin, he has to move somewhere else.”
In other news…
1.) I’ve been asked to profile a one-armed homeless cartoonist. I imagine the editor screaming, “One-armed, homeless cartoonist! This sounds like a job for Bob Levin!” But several things stand in the way. Not the least being my thinking it was time I settled into staring out the cafe window, working on my inner peace.
2.) Advance copies (two) of “Messiah” were expected at my publisher’s this weekend. This would mean the shipment would dock in NYC in mid-July, but due to the publisher’s schedule, the book would not be available until September. I do not mind the delay now that light brightens the tunnel’s end. All the more to time to obsess over invitations to the launch party and to add and drop names from the freebie list.
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.