I’ve had a ball this fall.
Hey. Ball this fall – that almost sounds poetic, doesn’t it? Too bad I’m not in a melancholy mood or I’d rap off a literary masterpiece with the possibilities of rocking the world.
But I’m not, so you are all out of luck until some future date. But I’m going to tell you what I have been up to, as well as what I am done gone went and going to be doing in the next few weeks.
If you are wondering how I manage to get away with a little improper English now and then, it’s because my grade school teacher passed away a couple of years ago, and I no longer have my Little Lady reading over my shoulder, who with little hesitation, would reach out and give my ear a not-so-gentle twist if she thought something was a little raunchy and perhaps needed to be toned down a little.
Besides, I get infinite pleasure out of irritating the editors at the paper once in a while. I have a tendency to call a spade a spade. For this I make no apologies. That could be considered a mistake by some, but after all, everybody makes mistakes. I once thought I made a mistake, but then I found out I was wrong. We are all vulnerable.
I also have a tendency to look at things from perhaps a different angle. If this is a fault perhaps the blame can be casually flicked in the direction of my father. He taught me, age 3, the alphabet backwards, which left me looking at the world from perhaps a different perspective. I can still spew out the Z, Y, X, W, V, all the way down to the F, E, D, C, B, A. To rob the words of my long gone mother, to anyone who complains, “If ya don’t like it, lump it.” If I do have faults I probably inherited them from my grandchildren. Who could argue that point?
In the meantime, I better stop this endless prattle and get around to telling you what I sat down to so do. My advice is to start reading out loud and listen closely to yourself, and you just might find out what fun you and your family are missing.
Four score, and seven years ago … No. I’m stealing from Abe Lincoln. That’s plagiarism. What I meant to say is, four weekends of the past six, I have been attending, close at hand, country fairs. It was there I was offering for sale my latest books. Book One and Book Two of The Best of Bits and Pieces. I must admit it was a lot of fun. I met people whom I never had the chance of meeting before. If they had popped up in my porridge I would not have recognized them, even though they have been reading my column for just a smidgen off of 25 years. Many of them, recognizing my signature hat, bought my books.
As the circulation of The Wellington Advertiser reaches almost 40,000 addresses each and every week, I have reason to believe there are about 37,463 and one half (one lady told me she reads out loud when pregnant), readers out there who have not had the opportunity, to shake my hand, part with their money, and go home with one of my books.
I’ll not let you slackers down, I’m going to be at two more book fairs coming up prior to Christmas. One is on Nov. 22. The other is Dec. 7. Mark your calendar. Shorten your gift list.
I’ll see you at one or the other, or both. I’m out of space, I’ll have to tell you where they are next week.
Take care, ’cause we care.