"Well, Poopsie," I said, "how about it?"
During the morning corralling of cats, I had placed her in possession of the latest developments regarding that book. You remember the book I'm working on. It's a guide for coping with the less pleasing emotions--anxiety, depression--that make one wonder why we bother. I can't wait for the book to be published because I know that reading it will change a lot of lives for the better. Maybe even mine. But no matter how many people look forward to the publication, the fact remains that it must get written, and there, as the man said, is the rub. I'll bet it was Shakespeare who said it first. He seemed to have a knack for coming up with catchy sayings. Would have been a superstar in the Marketing Department.
But I was talking about my book. My agent phoned over the holidays to remind me that it's been almost a year since we first spoke of the book. He was expecting to see a draft before now and is pressing me to get on with it. Easy for him, of course. He doesn't have to write the damn thing. Not so easy for me. I feel like the toad must have felt beneath that harrow. If it was a toad. What is a harrow anyway?
"Thought of anything?" I said to the Wonder.
She didn't answer immediately and this silence instilled in me something of the cold hand clutching the heart. What one doesn't want to hear when pressing a trusted advisor for much needed counsel is the still air. I stifled a hollow groan.
I don't know if you've ever had the experience of surprising a mother bear playing in an open meadow with her new-born cub. Me neither. But I can guess the gist of the results. The adrenal glands empty vats of cortisols into the blood stream, the heart races, the breath comes in deep gulps and the face tingles. That's what this hesitation on her part was doing to me now. I fully expected her suggestion, when she finally discharged it, would catch the Genome right between the eyes.
I continued to dress but my heart wasn't in it. I socked the feet with trembling hands, reminding myself that I was enough for anything that life was about to bung my way. The thought helped a little but it didn't completely erase the feeling that the spinal cord had been left in the fridge past the expiration date.
"It may be," I said, hoping to bolster up the spirit, "that you don't have the whole of the situation clear in your mind. Let me itemize the facts."
"The shirt," she said, and I was relieved to hear that she had changed the topic. "One strives for a straight button-line from neck to waist."
"But I have ankylosing spond...."
"There," she said as she tugged on the front of my shirt. "Perfect"
"Thank you, Poopsie."
"Not at all."
"There are times, when I wonder if gig lines matter," I said.
"The mood will pass," she said.
"I don't know why it should," I said. "Without a solution to this problem, my life will be meaningless. Unless something pops up in my morning meditations I will be lost. Solutions do sometimes pop up, don't they? As though out of the blue?"
"Archimedes is said to have discovered the principle of displacement suddenly during his bath," she said as though remembering something her grandmother had told her.
"Was that a big deal?" I said.
"It's generally considered to have been a very important discovery just as it's generally regretted that he was later killed by a common soldier."
"Aren't you confusing Archimedes with the tai chi master who developed the Five Animal Frolics?"
"Hua Tou was killed by a mistrustful army general, I believe," she said.
"Still," I said, "one soldier is much like another but what's all that got to do with my situation?"
"Well," she said,"it couldn't have been a pleasant experience for either of them."
She spoke truth, of course, and I mused on her words. There seemed to be a lesson for me hidden there. I made a moue. I remember thinking how odd it was. It is moue isn't it, where you push out the lips and then pull them back again?
"We do what we must do," she said, "and often the best course of action is to do the next thing in front of us."
"Is that what great men do?"
"Great and small," she said.
"Alright," I said. "Today I'll organize what I have of the chapters and then first thing tomorrow, I'll get started on bringing the book to a finish."
"And deliver it into the agent's hands," she said.
I'm not sure what Napoleon would have had to say about all this but I've noticed that sometimes we find ourselves operating without benefit of a great general. I noticed it now. The room was completely absent of generals. I sighed deeply and resigned myself to finishing the draft of that book. It is, after all, the next thing in front of me.