My Book Reading, and Other Events From My Week

Every week at work I’m required to submit a “weekly report,” in which I list my “weekly high,” “weekly low,” and “anything else you’d like to add.” I often use this space to write funny stories from my week or random interesting facts I’ve discovered lately.

I’ve thought before that this could be an interesting format for a blog post. 

Let’s try it!

Weekly high:

Sunday evening, I had my reading at church. 

The thing about book events is you never know how they’re going to go. Your mind goes wild, imagining masses of people showing up, and then you panic, thinking what if no one comes at all? And sometimes masses of people show up, and sometimes no one comes at all.

But usually, it’s somewhere in the middle. 

This one was somewhere in the middle. Not masses of people, but enough to fill the chairs lined up in the art gallery at my church. 

I greeted people as they arrived, directing them to the table where they could get some tea, and then, when most people had arrived, I took my place at the front of the crowd. As usual when I’m public speaking, my nerves vanished instantly the moment I was in front of people, and I felt energized and ready to go.

I started by giving a brief summary of my background, and then I started reading from The Highway and Me and My Earl Grey Tea. I started with the first part of Chapter 1. After that, I skipped ahead to the portion of Chapter 2 where I visited Nashville and hung out with my cousin Jason. That was relevant to the group because the section detailed my first-ever visit to an Anglican church. Also, Jason himself was in the audience. 

In all honesty, it was a bit hard for me to know what portions to read, because I haven’t read my book since I wrote it. After five years, I’m a little fuzzy on what’s all in there. My friend Mariah, who’d recently read it, helped me choose the sections. But in the Nashville section, I wrote about my cousin Lenny’s death when I was a teenager and how it still affects me. And even though I’d practiced beforehand, I wasn’t really prepared for how vulnerably I’d written, and I started to cry.

Note to self: next time you do a reading, bring a Kleenex, just in case.

I managed to pull myself together, but for the rest of the reading, bits of salty snot dribbled into my mouth.

Since that section dealt with generational mental health issues, I tied it together with the short portion from Chapter 3 where, in Ohio, I went to a hidden Amish fabric store in a tiny town, and later discovered it was the town where the-ancestors-of-the-bad-mental-health had come from.

Then, the reading portion concluded, I did my best to sum up what I’ve been up to since the trip I depicted in my book, and how I ended up living in Chattanooga, attending an Anglican church. 

The people who came really seemed to enjoy it, and a bunch of them wanted to buy copies. Then, after it was all said and done, I went out and got a burger with some friends, because frankly, my pre-reading nerves had not been particularly conducive to eating food.

Weekly Low:

There was a moment Sunday morning where I began to despair. My computer screen went black, but the keyboard still lit up. No matter how long I held down on the power button, it wouldn’t turn completely off.

My computer is getting to that age where it periodically has little glitches like this. But it always heals itself. And I am the sort of person who would much rather keep using old things than buy new things. So I haven’t replaced it yet.

But meanwhile, I needed to streamline and print out my notes, as well as create a sign listing the prices of my books alongside a Venmo QR code. And I needed a computer to execute both of these tasks.

For a while, I thought it was beyond the skill of even my brother Matt, because he didn’t seem to be finding solutions either. But just when I’d fully despaired, he sent me a solution: hold down the volume-up button while pushing the power button.

I tried it. My laptop powered off. I hit the power button again. It turned on normally. Everything was right as rain.

Other Things I Want to Add:

I spend way more time with friends here in Chattanooga than I ever did in Houston or Blacksburg, but it came with a small downside: I felt like I no longer had time for adventures.

But one Thursday, while making plans with my friend Mariah, I suddenly had a thought: I don’t need to go on adventures alone! So I asked her if she wanted to go on adventures with me. 

Our plan is to have weekly Thursday afternoon adventures, and this week, we went to a tulip farm. It was kind of a drizzly day, and we were too poor to actually purchase luscious bouquets of tulips, but we had fun anyway.

“Oh! These tulips match your boots!” said Mariah, and we stopped to take pictures.

An interlude to talk about red rubber boots:

When Mariah first saw my boots, she said, “Are these THE red rubber boots from your blog?”

The answer is…I guess?

There really is no “official” pair. When I named this blog, I didn’t even own red rubber boots⁠.

Here’s the story: I had Thanksgiving at my aunt’s house one year, and her friend’s children were watching an episode of Phineas and Ferb that was a parody of The Wizard of Oz. Instead of ruby slippers, there were red rubber boots. 

Why did this detail enchant me so? I can’t explain it. Perhaps for the same reason I was obsessed with duchies when I named my Instagram. But later, I did buy a pair, and I took them along to Bible School, and I guess they were pretty iconic because recently I ran into a guy I hadn’t seen since we were at SMBI together in 2013, and he said, “you had those red rubber boots!”

However, that pair eventually wore out.

But then, a couple of years ago, I saw a girl in Starbucks wearing a pair of red rubber Chelsea boots, and wee little hearts popped out of my eyeballs. It was all the charm of red rubber boots, but a more sophisticated, grown-up version! The image lodged in my brain and when I moved to Houston, with its yard full of boggy puddles and ditches after the rain, I needed some waterproof footwear and ordered a pair on Amazon.

Back to the tulip farm

This farm was selling bags of cow feed for a dollar. Feeding cows sounded fun! I handed over my cash.

But then, clutching the heavy paper bag of cow feed as we wandered along admiring tulips, I had to ask, where exactly are these cows?

The pasture to the north, where we expected them to be, was empty. To the east stretched a field of dead sunflowers, the south had a collection of cow statues (we’re not just supposed to pretend-feed a statue, are we?), and to the north was the parking lot and the road. 

Finally, I asked an employee. She looked around. “Oh, they’re back there.” She pointed to the pasture beyond the dead sunflowers.

So Mariah and I walked along the edge of the sunflower field. 

I’ve never fed a cow by hand before. I’ve fed goats, and they always run toward you, excited. The cows, however, did not. We walked along the fence until we were close enough to hold a handful of feed through the barbed-wire fence, but the cows just blinked their big black eyes at us, uninterested. 

I wished my mom were with us. Surely, she could speak to them in Pennsylvania Dutch and they’d understand that we were kind people offering a snack.

In the end, I managed to entice one cow to briefly lick my fingertips. But I ultimately ripped the bag open and set it on the ground for them to eat. 

Final thoughts

Sometimes I struggle to know how to end blog posts.