It is no fun sitting around waiting to hear from editors. It is much more enjoyable to be out somewhere imagining the calls and e-mails piling up.
But yesterday after lunch I sat on the balcony and worked on a speech. The sky had a wintry cast. A light rain started falling, tapping the palm fronds and dulling the canal. (At moments like this I try to block out the condos - both the one in front of me and the one I'm in - and imagine myself a character in a Graham Greene novel.) Thunder - February thunder! - crashed in the west. The rain fell harder, dimming my view and dampening my papers. Reluctantly, I moved inside.
Opening the door to go check the mail, I found a large white envelope propped against the wall. Inside it was a book: The Extraordinary Existence of Nadine Tallemann: A Bildungsroman. Turning it over I found a picture of the author and recognized her immediately as our second-floor neighbor. (She had never mentioned she wrote.) Turning back to the cover I read a quote from Vladimir Nabokov's Ada: "...the logical impossibility to relate the dubious reality of the present to the unquestionable one of remembrance."
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