One of the cool things about blogging (or guest blogging, as the case may be) is that life's myriad annoyances are suddenly transformed into narrative material. (Day 5 and I'm finally getting the hang of this...)
OK, so here goes:
Yesterday, I took the train from Albany ? the station closest to my house ? down to New York City. When I got to Manhattan, the weather was horrendous ? it was snowing, but also sporadically hailing and raining ? and the sidewalks were coated with crunchy slush. I had to get from Penn Station to the studios of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, at Third Avenue at 47th Street. (The things authors will do for their books ? would they even do them for their children?) I could take the subway only as far as Grand Central, at Lexington and 42nd Street. By the time I had walked the rest of the way, I was sopping. I was ushered into the lobby and left to entertain myself with a stack of old Newsweeks. After a while, the technician came to fetch me. I was still wet and, by now, freezing.
"Doesn't seem like global warming, does it?" she said cheerfully.
"That's the thing about global warming," I said.
"Oh, yeah, it's deceptive?"
"Yeah, it can be pretty tricky."
I was there to do a show called "Sunday Morning Live." It was Thursday afternoon, so I had to conclude that this was a misnomer. Sitting on the table in the sound booth was a picture of the host, Christopher Thomas. He was smiling. He looked very charming.
The technician tried to reach the "Sunday Morning Live" producer in ? I don't know where. Ottawa? Toronto?
"Can you hear me?" she kept asking. "Do you hear me now? I'm going out fine."
She fiddled with some wires plugged into a console. The arrangement looked like the back of my refrigerator. "Oh, shit," she said.
A large clock ticked away the seconds. "We never have trouble," she assured me. I nodded understandingly. Tick, tick, tick. She fiddled with some more wires. It seemed to me that she had no idea what she was doing. Tick, tick. Either I was wrong or she was very lucky, because eventually she managed to get a signal. Mr. Thomas was, indeed, charming. The interview went fine.
"We never have any problems," the technician assured me again as I was pulling on my wet coat.
* * *
It has, it seems, become a tradition for guest bloggers on this site to conclude by describing their own connection to Powell's. In this regard ? as in so many others ? I'm afraid I fall short, as I have never been to Powell's or, for that matter, to Portland. But I will be there to do a reading on Wednesday, March 22nd. If you're in town, do come. I'd love to meet you.