Being an obscure writer with an obscure publisher puts you out there on your own. You’re a Willy Loman, chatting up the managers of bookstores, writing snappy letters to regional buyers, and leaving off fliers at libraries. Willy was out there on a shoeshine and a smile. I wear sneakers. Either way, you meet all kinds, and it can be especially exciting if you have a speech problem.

A few years ago, I spent a fascinating 24 hours under the ether having throat cancer removed. A scrub nurse assured me it was a hoot, what with the Grim Reaper banging on the door. I’m fine now, but I don’t say my hard “g” or my “k” very well. I met a guy in a Minneapolis bookstore named Gary. He kept telling me his name isn’t Harry. He thought I was messing with him.

I talk okay these days, but in the first year doing a reading with surgically accented speech was a problem. Solution? Get your wife on-board. I’d stand up and mumble thanh you, and my wife would read one of my stories. We called it our dog-and-pony show, and I tried to negotiate about who could be the pony. The results were predictable. Woof, I might add.

In those days a library in our little clearing in the forest had us over. After the dog and pony did their tricks, they sat by the door at a table stacked attractively with books. I was really proud of the nice blue cover, we had a genuine cigar box for the loot, and I had practiced a new signature with nifty flourishes. Sometimes you just sit there as people walk by smiling sheepishly (the people do–we smiled doggedly and ponishly). But that day, a very old woman in a dress of room-clearing purple stopped at the table. A couple not much younger than I am hovered behind her, probably a daughter and her hubby.

“Young man,” the purple lady began (I was 63 that year), “I’m sorry that your speech isn’t right. For a while I tried to adjust my hearing aid, but then Deborah said it was just you.”

“I baffle the best hearing aids. Hope you didn’t miss much.”

“Oh, your wife has such a lovely voice, and the story about the retarded boy was so sad. Have you ever been retarded? Is that why your speech is off.”

“No,” I replied. “It’s due to cancer surgery.”

“Oh, well I’m so happy! My brother had a brain that wasn’t right. He couldn’t say much, so his brain swelled up from keeping the words inside. He died when we were children in Iowa.”

“I was a child just north of Iowa.”

“What a shame! You just missed us!”

The daughter stepped forward to tell her mom that a line was forming.

“Well,” the purple lady said, “I’m going to buy a book. If you could just write a check for the nice young man, Deborah.”

I asked her name and wrote “to Wilma” on the title page.

“I can read this without adjusting my hearing aid.” She gave a perky smile.

“Just clean your glasses,” I replied. Wilma’s well-colored lips burst into laughter as though she had just heard the summer’s best joke.

Riding home in our Camry, my wife talked about how charming Wilma had been, and I agreed. We were glad that we didn’t have a big New York publisher who would shove us on the Oprah show and deprive us of the Wilma experience. Viki wondered, cradling the cigar box in her lap, if Wilma would actually clean those glasses and read my book. I said that it didn’t matter. There are great people out there who have no reason to be interested in what I write, and I was happy just to think that Wilma might remember me for two or three days as “that nice young man.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Book Event, Minnesota Literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.