In Steve's Memory

In August, my husband lost one of his best friends. Steve was 54, the father of 4, grandfather of 2, plumber extraordinaire and an all around good guy. One day he was here redoing our downstairs bathroom and two weeks later he was gone. As I sat listening to the minister’s words and the remembrances of his family and friends, of course I was inundated with thoughts about my own life.

The one thing that really surprised me was my lack of regrets and specifically how little I cared that I had never had a book published. For a lot of years, being PUBLISHED was my goal, my Holy Grail, the number one thing on my to do list every January 1^st. Being published meant you were a successful writer, that you had risen to the top of your game, that you had made it and you could now call yourself an AUTHOR, not just a writer.

But as I sat in that church pew I realized that while I had never had a book published, I had written and published hundreds of articles, short stories, columns, reviews, blog entries and a bunch of other odds & ends that had given people information, had made them laugh (or scream, or throw up, depending on the genre) and in some small way made their lives a little better, or at least more interesting. And that knowledge made me happy. Happy in a way that chasing that publishing contract never has and I understand now, probably never will. Being published may or may not come to me one day, but writing, for love, for fun, for my own amusement, for the joy of communicating with others or to understand my own mind and heart is a sure thing, one that is part of me every day. And I’m going to rejoice in that…and I think Steve would approve.