I'm at Texas A&M for Aggiecon, and would post something sensible and intelligent, but have been travelling since really early this morning and am utterly exhausted.
My heart swelled with pride though when daughter Holly (who flew down to Texas to keep me company here) handed me small daughter Maddy's first CD. She made it in the same studio I recorded the next spoken word album in, and from a photo I was e-mailed today looks like she had much more fun than I did. It's her playing the violin, duetting with herself and so on -- a Suzuki Book 1 Graduation tape that got a little out of hand.
Proofread the Biting Dog Press edition of the play for voices "Snow Glass Apples" on the plane, then sat back and read while the ladies on each side of me chatted cheerfully across me to to each other about their experiences in marketing cellular phones ("I told him, I may not be a CEO but you remember who came up with 'Free weekends -- for life!' and it sure wasn't him,") battles with cancer ("I said honey, you just tell those people to call me. I can tell them, cos I beat it not once but twice"), the uselessness of studying any language in school except Spanish, and the search for meaning in a corporate world. Not that I was listening.
At the end, one of the ladies asked what I did. I said I was a writer. "Well," she said, "When are you going to be a New York Times Bestseller then?" It was the kind of cheerfully patronising thing people say to strangers they meet on planes. I'm sure if I'd said I was a musician she'd have said "Well, when are you going to have a hit record then?" I think I was meant to shrug and say "One day," hopefully with a wistful smile, and she would have told me that was the spirit, but I said "Last June," and then it all turned into a strange exercise in pronunciation when she asked me for the title of the book, and I said "American Gods". She said, puzzled, "American Guards?" "No, Gods" said her friend, "American Gods," I added. "American Gourds?" she asked, rather desperately. There is obviously a Texan way of pronouncing Gods that I wasn't able to do.