Amazon tells me that my book will be available for purchase on July 15. You can click that link and pre-order it. How about that?
True confessions: I am happy to tell you a story, but it is uncomfortable for me to suggest you buy my book. As the descendant of generations of self-effacing Protestants it is not easy to suggest that you invest in a copy. I hope you do, though. I'm proud of it. I think it's a good read.
When our daughter Clara was three days old, she developed a minor eye infection. We took her with us to the drug store to pick up a prescription. She weighed just under seven pounds and was slumped over in her car seat because her body wasn't strong enough to support her own weight yet. Newborns are like that. We wandered the aisles of the Walgreen's in downtown Palo Alto waiting for the prescription to be ready--wandered slowly, because she and her sister had been born just a few days before and I was moving carefully. And because we thought Clara might break if we moved fast.
After what seemed like hours the prescription was ready. The pharmacist called the patient's name over the loudspeaker, and it was the first time anyone had said our child's full name out loud. To us it seemed almost unfathomable that this creature who we had created and whose name we had chosen was now alive, in the world, and with her own eye ointment. A person who was separate from us, even at age three days. A carefully tended miracle.
That is the closest analogy I have to my book entering the world. I made something and now it will exist independently. At some point I may be able to fathom that, but not yet. It is a different kind of miracle.
