Lukewarm Water

Yesterday wasn’t the best day.

I don’t like to complain and, the truth is, I have very little to complain about. Still, yesterday was not the best day.

I woke with a stomachache. I’d gone to bed with a stomachache, and this is not terribly unusual. My mother gets stomachaches, and now my 20-year-old niece is prey to them. Stress and irregular eating set them off, these stomachs of ours, and sometimes they take hours or even days to get sorted out. This one was particularly stubborn and saw me through the night and into the next day. By midmorning, I realized, unless I was writing about a stomachache, I wasn’t likely to get much writing done.

So I thought I’d learn a new program I’d promised myself I’d learn. The young woman on the video assured me that this training was for “absolute beginners,” and I felt reassured. I sat down with my stomachache and started watching.

I had no idea what she was talking about.

It wasn’t that she left me behind—I never got on the bus. The bus pulled away and left me standing on the curb. I suddenly felt old. I was an old woman with a stomachache.

Then I heard from my agent. My agent is cheerful and hopeful and loves my book, and she’s working hard right now to sell it. She wrote to tell me I got another rejection. She sounded pretty down—for a perpetually upbeat person. She sounded as if we might be running out of people to send my book to. This was depressing news.

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