Coming Clean

I distorted the facts to decorate the walls of that pity party I threw myself the other day when I whined about how I haven't met with the kind of commercial success Joyce Maynard has seen. I'm re-reading that post this morning and see that I made it also sound like I'm some unselfish Mother Teresa who, rather than crassly selling her books, simply gives them away. As if I didn’t have a website devoted to marketing my own books never mind that its shopping cart is kind of cobwebby these days…I’ve been looking back to 2005 over the last hour in search of the column I wrote about my day  teaching in that Brooklyn middle school and though I haven’t yet managed to unearth it I did come upon a letter that reached me that year. It came from a deployed soldier who received some of those books I sent out into the world via Operation Paperback and reading it again just now makes me wonder why I am not grateful 110% of the time for the privilege of writing every days, whoever sees it on whatever battlefield of life. This from one James Burt, rank unknown to me, who at the time was embedded with an Afghan Army unit: "Thank you so so dearly for donating these books to our library here in Kabul, Afghanistan.  They are both books that I would not have fully appreciated while I was younger, but they are truly awe-inspiring in their poignant insight and humanity to me now.”This is he, sometime during that mission. I'm going to try to find him and get back later.