PC's BUSY DAY, Part I

Yesterday morning I did a lot of the usual things--coffee, cereal, a little SSX Tricky on the kids' GameCube--and a few less usual things--cleaning the kitchen, taking out the garbage, etc. The big difference between yesterday and the 40 years + 18 days preceding them is that yesterday I had to get ready to be a Writer.

I've been writing original material since slightly after I could read, so technically I've been a writer almost all my life--but this was the first time I would ever have to stand up in front of a group of strangers and admit it. Since I was on the schedule for the Virginia Festival of the Book, however, there wasn't much else I could do--people were going to come to the Cavalier Best Western expecting to see a writer, and it was going to have to be me.

Or were they going to come? What if it was just me at the lectern and Kelly and my mom and my aunt in the audience? Wouldn't that be humiliating? Wouldn't that be worse than never having signed up for the Festival at all? Jeez! And I had five boxes of books to sell! Who'd buy thispiece of crap?

Eventually I recognized some of these symptoms; they're the same ones I get when we're hosting a party. Kelly describes these paradoxical feelings as "No one's going to come and there won't be enough food!"

So I settled down a bit, marked a few passages, checked my Amazon.com ranking (840,000+), ran to Readerville for some calming affirmations, got some advice, remarked some passages based on the advice, packed my stuff, showered, argued with myself over what to wear for a while, loaded the car with five boxes of books and two boxes of free samples of The Readerville Journal, and headed off to Charlottesville.

Kelly had discovered at work that C-VILLE Weekly, Charlottesville's free "News and Arts Weekly" paper, had reviewed the book. This was a complete surprise to me; I hadn't even known Paul Dry Books had sent them a review copy. So now, with my first reading still in the offing, I was also getting to deal with my first review. When Kelly, the kids and I reached C-ville, however, we couldn't find a copy of C-VILLE Weekly, not even in Barnes & Noble. Eventually we recalled, however, that Bodo's Bagels has the paper available, and the kids eagerly suggested we pay them a visit. (They love bagels--good kids...)

We found a copy (OK, I found five copies...) and dug into it to find the review. It wasn't listed in the table of contents. We soon discovered that this was because it was part of the CLS--C-VILLE Literary Supplement--a separate section in the middle of the paper that focused on the Festival of the Book. There were several stories and reviews of several Festival-related books. Including The Verb To Bird.

Which was the lead review.

Yes, I got reviewed ahead of Ann Beattie, not to mention Brian Hall's I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company. And given that the entire Charlottesville vicinity has a year-long Lewis & Clark hard-on because of the expedition's bicentennial, finding myself ahead of Hall's book was simply stunning.

The review, by Aaron Carico, was favorable. Very favorable. Not blindly, rabidly so, mind you; he notes that the book "at times can be a bit haphazard," which is to my mind a simple statement of truth, but he also provides several comments guaranteed to soothe the nervous author's heart, including these:

--"As a 'birder' himself, Cashwell treats the matter with wit and self-deprecating humor."
--"...he has the good sense not to bore the uninitiated with copious details and mind-numbing lists"
--"Cashwell, though, writes with ease, humor and clarity... about a topic that if written about poorly would be ripe for parody."
--"...a funny, eclectic and engaging book..."

My favorite comment was this:

--"His sense of humor has a sort of sunny derision about it--there's an element of cheerfulness to his sarcasm and a bluntness to his wit."

Well. My bagel went down much better after that.

5:00 PM

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It's currently 6:05 p.m. EST, at least according to my computer's clock, which means that for the first time in eight years, Woodberry Forest School is in session and I'm not there.

Of course, I am there, in a sense--our house is on campus, after all--but I'm now officially on sabbatical. In honor of this momentous occasion, I am quaffing a sleeve of what must be one of the finest things ever put in a bottle, an Adelscott. It's a French product, a "biere au Malt a Whisky." It's 6.6% alcohol by volume, making it more potent than American beers, and it has a sweet smoky flavor that dances around your palate (and your nose) like the scent of a magnolia blossom dipped in bourbon. It's mighty, mighty fine, and I give kudos to m'learned colleague Wallace Hornady for bringing it back from his last trip to la belle France.

I don't get to drink this stuff when I'm on duty, let me say that much.

I haven't shaved, I'm wearing a stained and ratty shirt, and I'm listening to Derek & the Dominoes. I just hope the rest of my sabbatical feels this good.
3:14 PM

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