A literary visit and some progress

A most enjoyable coffee visit today with poet Cindy Huyser and author/publisher/marketing guru Deborah Winegarten (Katherine Stinson, Oveta Culp Hobby, and publisher of Almost a Minyan). I’ve known Debra two years or more through a small online writers group and met her once briefly, but I’d never met Cindy. They were in town for Cindy to receive a Will Rogers Medallion Award at the annual banquet last night for Bearing the Mask (Dos Gatos Press), the book of southwestern poetry she co-edited with Scott Wiggerman. The really neat thing about this award is that the judges told her the book didn’t fit their usual category—cowboy poetry—but they felt so strongly it deserved an award that they created a special category.

Our talk ranged through books and teaching young minds and books and caring for an elderly parent and books and Jewish food and politics and books—always there was the thread of books that holds us together. So often, with the people you know well and see daily, you don’t discuss the abstract, the different. You stick to semi-gossip and daily plans and the familiar. These two were like a breath of fresh air for me, and I’m grateful to them for squeezing me into their crowded weekend.

On another note, I am quite sure in any endeavor a little success encourages us to greater achievement—I know it’s true in writing, and I’m find it’s true in physical recovery. For a while this fall, I backslid on my exercises and my walking, discouraged by a brief hospitalization and a bit of irrational fear. But when I was about to decide I might never walk independently again, there came some glimmers of hope—a couple of new exercises that made sense to me, an improvement in my walking with someone to support me, the ability, just discovered, to rise form a chair without holding on (I do it ten times a day now), and the ability to move a little way from support, always touching something but without the death grip that characterized earlier attempts. I’m truly encouraged.

No Sunday family dinner tonight. The Burtons went to a fancy wedding reception, and Jacob and I had dinner, sort of. I had a lamb pattie and steamed carrots. He had broccoli. Turned down the sloppy Joe I had for him. He usually likes it but tonight took one look and said, “I’m not eating that.” So be it. Broccoli for dinner. No dessert.