Book in hand

categories: Cocktail Hour

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When the thing finally arrives.  Always a nice moment.

As coincidence would have it, I just happened to be working on a memoir about Ultimate Frsibee that ends with my first book arriving. Here is the passage about receiving that first book:

The package arrived in the mail in March of 1997, the year I stopped playing Ultimate.

It came in a simple UPS box and even though I knew what was inside the box I didn’t think it would affect me like it did. This was no big deal after all. Being on the cover of the New York Times, winning some big prize, having your face on the cover of a magazine. Those were the things that real writers were supposed to glory in. Not this.

And it wasn’t a surge of glory that I felt as I unwrapped the package and looked down at my first book. Hones had taken the cover picture, a beautiful beach scene of some birds over the sand flats in Brewster. (I didn’t think it wise to tell the publishers that he had been tripping, as had I, when he took the photo.) I held the book in my hand and felt something profound rise up inside me. It was not the blood lust of a Frisbee conqueror spiking a disk on the field, or the exhilaration I would feel at the birth of my daughter. It was something much quieter. Something calmer and deeply satisfying. My face flushed with pleasure. I had the sense that I had finally accomplished something, something that it seemed I had been trying to accomplish forever.

But, then again, at the same time I had the opposite sensation. The sense, not of finality and achievement but of promise. The feeling that, after many false starts and much stumbling, I had at long last begun.