Vacationing in My Ride

Dec 2

So I guess what I was saying is that first book o' mine was basically about those awkward moments like like the parish priest shows up at your door and your dog comes downstairs with half a box of tampons in his mouth.Or when your children’s poor daddy, as sleep-deprived as you are with your two little girls under four, opens his briefcase at the big presentation to find the frilly underpants of Baby Crawl Away tucked carefully into one corner.

That’s I Thought He Was a Speed Bump, the book I was waxing nostalgic about yesterday. I wrote it when I was young and almost everything in life struck me funny, aside from the sudden death of my only parent, which threw me for a loop that looped for four long years.

With the passage of time however, I began to see how death fits into the larger scheme. That’s when I wrote this book whose cover you see here.I had two themes in mind for it: that everything returns if you wait long enough - like spring for example - and that you can find a wonderful kind of calm in this crazy modern life if you can just manage sit there for a minute when you pull up outside your house – just sit there and let the inner waters clear for a bit instead of rushing inside and bossing everyone around, including yourself ('Start the dinner!' 'Fold those clothes!' Why do we shout these things to ourselves all the time?)I love a double theme, in this case the theme of the seasons AND the theme of learning to chill out more, and come to think of it so does my littlest grandson who can’t resist being two things on Halloween. (This year he was a Power Ranger AND a Vampire.) But they say what you need to sell a book or movie is "high concept," the ability to sum it up in a sentence and that’s where I might have gone a little wrong with my two themes. It did OK though; I got it into all these Barnes & Noble stores and then drove all over the map giving funny talks about it.Then of course it all slowed down and the books gradually came back to me.This happened right after I had gone to a second printing so I still have almost 3,000 mint copies which is why I’m offering them here.As I say, this book is funny like Speed Bump AND has some death in it but what doesn’t, right?YOU can have a copy for just $10 bucks too if you like.One of my favorite chapters is this one about letters to Santa, taken right from the pages of an actual newspaper. (You'll have to click on this first image to see it in a readable size..)and the last page of the chapter: