Christmas Eve Roll Call

Winter storm warning, winter weather advisory, freezing rain, heavy snow. That's been the story for the last week or so. Susanna's (my mom's) long driveway was treacherous. I got stuck in the driveway the previous day, but had to hope for the best. I picked up Denise Martin in Parchment and brought her (with oxygen), backing up partway down the drive. Three hours later when I drove Denise home, I was stuck, but with help from Matt Schwartz and David Magson (and when I managed to put the car into drive... oops!) Sheila and Matt Schwartz made it just fine in the minivan. George and Matt Campbell came in the four-wheel-drive truck, so they were fine. Darcy and Kayla and Krystal Campbell got in and out. Gina Betcher did fine as well, in her car, parking pretty far from the house, carrying two good bottles of wine. Tom Campbell didn't do as well; he got his rear-wheel-drive truck stuck in slush-covered ice partway up the drive; he fought to get free and when he finally did, he was so annoyed he turned around and drove himself and Kennedy back home again, so we didn't have their company. If Tom had made it, then we wouldn't have overcooked the beef so it wasn't pink. Susanna was quite sad about that. Mike Messer ventured down from his home in the workshop to have a glass of wine. After dinner and the gift exchange Loring ended up giving Kellee Campbell a guitar lesson, and she paid dutiful attention. Kellee wanted to be free to drink too much wine, so her papa Mike agreed to stay sober so he could drive her home (he left his little truck at Kellee's house rather than even attempt the driveway). Julianna was the only little kid, and we kept her occupied with foods containing no eggs or nuts (oh, those allergies). Paul, fiance of Krystal showed up after 8:00 when he got out of work; he was so cold from working outside at Meijer's gas station that he couldn't even eat. Darling Christopher was not with us; until eleven-twenty that evening he was saturating moist toilettes with acne medication and putting them in foil packets. The cold and harsh weather has emboldened the deer, so they're coming close to the house to eat the birdseed and yew bushes. I tell those deer they're going to be venison if they're not careful. They do look healthy.

One Wild Day

My pal Susan Ramsey, erstwhile bookseller, is a connoisseur of book covers, and she has long maintained that in order to sell, a book should have a face on the color or the color red. She is speaking from experience of trying to distract humans as they travel from the front door of the independent bookstore to the table in the middle where the Harry Potter books are

Here’s the new paperback cover of the new German version of Q Road, translated as “Ein Wilder Tag,” One Wild Day. I nearly wept for joy when I saw it. Though I can’t read a word in it (beyond my name and the names in the acknowledgments page), I’ve dragged my own copy of the new book around town and made everybody look at it. I just never dreamed I’d have a book on whose cover a beautiful little boy is stroking his, um, ...chicken. It’s super fun to be published in German, and I can only imagine how brilliant my translator is; she only asked me about ten questions during the translation process, including “what is finch seed”? After this lovely book, whatever else gets published now with my name on the cover is gravy. Of course I immediately wrote to the German Editor at Droemer-Knaur, Caroline Graehl, suggesting they should buy the German rights to American Salvage. One must always be marketing oneself, and it doesn’t necessarily take away from the joy.


This picture is the cover of the hardcover German edition, 2004.

Susanna Despises, Endures Hospital

“This feels like a wake,” Susanna said, looking around the room at us through one eye. The other eye was angry red and swelled shut . This was last Monday, three days before Thanksgiving. Susanna, my mother, was smoking her last cigarette and sipping her last vodka drink before turning herself in. The mournful onlookers included Loring Janes, Chris Magson, the singing contractor Steve Barrett,and his sidekick Mike, and myself. Steve and Mike had spent the day in the barnyard, working on rebuilding the old chicken barn. Nobody was dead or dying, but Susanna was getting ready to go into the hospital for an indeterminate stay. Susanna hates the hospital more than anything, and yet her eye was swollen like a fleshy red golf ball, and she knew they were going to keep her for a while.

They did tests and took blood, and the eye guy determined it was an eye socket infection. Apparently they couldn’t tell what sort of infection it was, because she’d been taking the antibiotic Keflax for four days and it might have masked the bacteria. They kept her, kicking and screaming (or at least wandering the halls and complaining bitterly), giving her dose after dose of antibiotics vancomycin (the treatment for MRSA staph infection). Susuanna missed Thanksgiving, which was held at my house. My brother George took a cell phone picture of her eye at its worst, but she’d probably kill me if I posted it here. The photo I've posted is from this summer.

Susanna kept quoting a statistic suggesting that most people die in the hospital of something they didn’t have when they came in. When, during Susanna’s stay, her roommate was diagnosed with a MRSA staph infection, Susanna said, “See, precisely why I shouldn’t be in here.” She packed up her cloth bag of books and dragged it down the hall to her new room. She wore jeans and a sweat shirt—there was no reason to put on a gown when her whole reason for this “incarceration” was to get three doses of intravenous antibiotics a day. She calls it a waste of tax payer money, making medicare pay for a bed for her, when a creative medical system could have found a way to administer the antibiotics on an outpatient basis.

Her attending physician, a tiny Hospitalist, might have liked to keep her longer, but let her go on Sunday, and so Susanna rushed home and put her feet up on her desk. Except for the ruined digestion from the drugs, she’s pretty much back to normal. Except that she can still only see out of one eye.