Some days you get what you need . . .

 

So.

Did we lift our glasses in a toast to the judge, the jury, the Manhattan DA and the American justice system just after 5:00 p.m. the afternoon of May 30, 2024.

Damn right we did.

Drank a little, smiled a little, even danced a little, while watching MSNBC.

Because that guy is a criminal, a crook, a thug, a racist and a rapist.   And a felon.  A convicted felon.

A disgrace.

(Feel free to enter your own word of choice:  _________________________________ )

And dangerous to our country.

It took only minutes for the headlines to start shouting the news

And then came memes, and political cartoons, and the political columnists having their say.

And I participated.  

Watched the interviews and applauded.  

Shouted "Oh, hell yeah," at the TV.

Posted and shared more than my share of vitriol and contempt in regard to a man who deserves every insult, curse, gesture, and stream of invective thrown his way.

But still, even with a celebratory glass of bubbly in hand, there was sadness.  So much sadness for this country.  

Those 12 brave men and women were in agreement regarding all 34 counts.  

I wish I could tell each of them how much I appreciate them and what they did.

But.

As you well know, we have some very tough days ahead.

The Republican party has lost its collective heart and soul along with its spine.  This is NOT our parents' Grand Old Party.

And we know for sure that the Supreme Court won't be any help in the days ahead, quite the opposite. (Yet another huge concern that needs tackling).

It's up to us.

And I am hopeful.

But.

You all know all of of this.  I am preaching to the choir.

Once again, I forgot one of my goals in writing this post (imagine that).

Where I was going with all this before all my detours was to say that after hitting a wall today and needing to back away from the disgust of seeing that monster's face and reading the garbage he spews and exhausting myself by reacting, a little bit of serendipity found its way into my path.

In the words of The Great Rolling Stones . . .

"You can’t always get what you want

But if try sometimes, you just might find

You get what you need,

You get what you need."

Yes.

Poetry is, for me, an escape.

An entirely different sort of escape than immersing myself in a novel.

And it was just what my tired old self needed today.

And, thanks to NetGalley, I have been able to put my mind at rest, and my heart in a soft place to focus on the joy of the words of Billy Collins.

And was able to remember that, by golly, Life is good.

Description from NetGalley

From the former Poet Laureate of the United States and New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love comes a wondrous new collection of poems focused on the joys and mysteries of daily life.

"[Billy] Collins remains the most companionable of poetic companions." —The New York Times

In this collection of sixty new poems, Billy Collins writes about the beauties and ironies of everyday experience. A poem is best, he feels, when it begins in clarity but ends with a whiff of mystery. In Water, Water, Collins combines his vigilant attention and respect for the peripheral to create moments of delight. Common and uncommon events are captured here with equal fascination, be it a cat leaning to drink from a swimming pool, a nurse calling a name in a waiting room, or an astronaut reciting Emily Dickinson from outer space. With his trademark lyrical informality, Collins asks us to slow down and glimpse the elevated in the ordinary, the odd in the familiar. It’s no surprise that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both call Collins one of America’s favorite poets.

The Monet Conundrum

Is every one of these poems
different from the others
he asked himself,
as the rain quieted down,

or are they all the same poem,
haystack after haystack
at different times of day,
different shadows and shades of hay?

May serendipity do the same for you.  ❤

In the meantime . . .

A Toast

Serendipity by Margaret Maron

Margaret Maron is the author of twenty-six novels and two collections of short stories. Winner of several major American awards for mysteries (Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, Macavity), her works are on the reading lists of various courses in contemporary Southern literature and have been translated into 16 languages. She has served as president of Sisters in Crime, the American Crime Writers League, and Mystery Writers of America.

A native Tar Heel, she still lives on her family's century old farm a few miles southeast of Raleigh, the setting for Bootlegger's Daughter, which is numbered among the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century as selected by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. In 2004, she received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for best North Carolina novel of the year. In 2008, she was honored with the North Carolina Award for Literature. (The North Carolina Award is the state’s highest civilian honor.)


SERENDIPITY / Margaret Maron


Ser•en•dip•i•ty \ n \: the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.

When people ask why I don’t outline, I always say that I find that my books come out better if I leave them open to serendipity.

So many lovely things have happened in my life and in my work by not planning for them, not expecting them, that I begin to think one really can cultivate the “faculty of finding valuable things not sought for.”

Recently, a reader who had stumbled across Bloody Kin, my first NC book, excitedly asked me, “When you were writing this book seven years before you wrote Bootlegger’s Daughter, did you know that you would be having the main protagonist of that book turn out to be Deborah Knott’s sister-in-law many books later? And that she would be the one to repaint the wedding cake topper for Deborah?"

No. But when I needed someone to repaint that cake topper, there she was. Already in the family.

Serendipity

Years later, when writing the 9th DK novel, Slow Dollar, I needed for one of the new characters to suddenly appear out of nowhere and be closely related to Deborah. I took a look at the family tree that I created for the first book to see where I could put her and was startled to realize that she was already there. She even had a name and a bit of a mystery as to where she was and where she’d been all those years. I certainly didn’t plan it out when I first stuck that twig on the family tree, yet there she was, waiting for me when I needed her.


Serendipity

It works for real life, too. Years ago, I favorably reviewed a first novel, knowing absolutely nothing about the author except that I liked the book and with no expectation that it would come to anything more than any other review. The author sent me a thank-you note, we began corresponding and became friends. A couple of years later, when I needed a new agent, she introduced me to hers which is how I came to meet the agent I will have till one of us dies. (Insert that S word again!)

Early in my Deborah Knott series, someone wrote me that she had read that I planned to take my judge to courtrooms all over the state of North Carolina.“If you ever want to bring her over here to the mountains, I’d be pleased to show you around and act as a resource person.” I wrote back and thanked her and stuck the letter in a folder marked Possible Future Books: Mtns. Eventually, I decided that yes, it might be fun to send Deborah out to the Blue Ridge Mountains. I rooted out the letter and wrote, “You once offered to be a resource. Does the offer still stand?”

Which is how Kaye Barley came into my life and will be in my life forever.



I mentioned Bloody Kin before? It actually triggered the main serendipitous turning point in my career. I had written three books set against the NY art world with a NYPD homicide detective, Sigrid Harald. The books sold well enough to keep my editor happy, but they didn’t seem to catch on and after writing three of them, I sneaked in that stand-alone set right here on our family farm. It sank like a rock, so I went back to writing about NY.

Two or three years later, the Triangle Romance Writers decided to put on a multi-genre conference in Raleigh. I was invited to do a workshop on mysteries. They had snared some associate editors and a couple of agents to come down from New York. I wound up having supper with one of the editors. She was nice. It was a pleasant meal, but others were at the table and we didn’t really connect.

When the conference began, it was early spring, a chilly rain all weekend, too raw to walk outside, but on Sunday morning, spring arrived as only spring can in our part of the state. Forsythia popped out, azaleas and dogwoods spread their blossoms, wisteria dripped from the pines, pansies came back to life—it was beauty everywhere you looked and after a weekend in the hotel, I was ready to go home and enjoy the farm.

As I passed through the lobby on the way to my car, I heard the editor I’d met ask the hotel clerk what there was to do within walking distance for three hours until her plane left. He suggested that she walk across six lanes of traffic to the mall that was across from the motel.

Now my husband is always telling me that I don’t know where my parameters end. That I always feel I must make things nice for others whether they want them made nice or not. That I don’t mind my own business.

But I couldn’t bear to think that this was her first time in NC and all she was going to see of it was a shopping mall no different from the stores in New York?

“Excuse me,” I said, “but if you’ve got a couple of hours to kill, would you like a quick tour of Raleigh?”

I showed her the Capitol Square (dogwoods and azaleas everywhere), our Victorian governor’s mansion and the historic section of town. I took her out to Meredith College and showed her the collection of dolls that each graduating class has dressed in contemporary clothes since shortly after the college was founded in 1891; and we wound up looking at the historic 1912 Dentzel carousel in Pullen Park and just sitting on one of the benches in the warm spring sunshine talking,talking, talking.

By the time I took her back to catch her airport shuttle, we were friends. Back in New York, she immediately hunted out a copy of Bloody Kin and loved it. “You really ought to write another North Carolina book,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Nobody wants to read a mystery set in the rural South” and I continued to write another couple of Sigrid Harald books.

“Seriously,” she said whenever we met at conferences over the next couple of years. “You really should write another North Carolina book.”

So I did and she bought it (Bootlegger’s Daughter). Sara Ann Freed was my dream editor for ten books until her death and I will miss her forever. Every time I stop and think how close I came to missing her friendship when I passed through that hotel lobby, I shiver.




So yes, I will keep on leaving myself open to serendipity. (As does Kaye!)