I was on the road with my new novel, Breakdown, from the first of January until February 2, so I substituted little snippets on Facebook for my blog. Being on tour is a privilege and in many ways a pleasure because of the different bookstores and readers you encounter, but the downside is you are only in any given city for about 18 hours–you really come with the dust and go with the wind. My 18 hours in the LA area were particularly wonderful. Beloved friends who I don’t often see drove over to Pasadena for my event at Vroman’s bookstore.

After dinner, we went up to the lounge in the Langham hotel where they have a typewriter Ernest Hemingway used when he was covering World War II from London. Guests were invited to write a letter on the machine, and I did so, sending one to my friend and mentor Dorothy Salisbury Davis. Those of you who know Ms. Davis know that she never has migrated to a computer, and continues to write on her old upright, so it seemed fitting. I learned to type on a manual Underwood myself, but I had forgotten how much wrist strength is needed to hammer those keys. I gave up after a couple of paragraphs filled with overstruck letters from jamming the keys. A couple of Canadian journalists who were in the lounge wanted to show off for my friend and her 14-year-old daughter, so they started pounding away, only to discover that they, too, had lost the magic of the manual machine.

I don’t seem well-organized mentally these days. Every place I went on the road I left something behind, usually not an object of huge importance, but I abandoned my iPad in Palo Alto, and without the generosity of Sherry Barson, who was driving me, I would have been a sad and sorry writer. Sherry added two hours to her homebound commute to make a rendezvous with the event coordinator, retrieve my iPad and bring it to my hotel, which was as far from her own home as could be imagined.  Another good Samaritan was United flight attendant Kelly Linn, who found my journal in the pocket of my airplane seat and took the trouble to track me down and mail it to me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me these days–hope it isn’t plaque build-up in the brain–but I am definitely not firing on all cylinders. Perhaps after a month of puppy therapy with my Golden all will return to more or less normal.

My luckiest event of the tour was my trip to Toronto to take part in the Toronto Star’s “Star Talk” series at the Toronto Public Library.  I got to the airport at 6:30 in the morning so I could catch the early flight, but the Toronto airport was shut  because of dense fog.  After sitting at the airport for 8 hours, doing my back exercises behind a row of chairs, wandering from food bar to food bar, our flight was suddenly called. We were the only flight to make it in from Chicago that day, and why they cleared us I’ll never know–we couldn’t see the ground in Toronto until our plane was level with the Harbor front skyscrapers–but I got there just in time to take part in the series. It was a great event, well organized and incredibly well attended, and a brilliant conversation afterwards at dinner with the paper’s publisher and editor and a woman from the library. They were inveighing, as we in Chicago have been doing, about cuts to the library budget. Margaret Atwood has been a passionate advocate for the library, but the mayor of Toronto said he’d never heard of her and didn’t care what she had to say! However, their city council certainly had and forced the mayor to back down. I wonder if Rahm has heard of me, Stuart Dybek, or any of the other writers who have been trying to get our libraries back up to full staff and full hours?