Finding Myself In A Notebook

You just never know where one thing and another will lead.  Here’s what I mean.

New Horizons’ Coffee House Conversations On Race Relations brought me a much-needed volunteer Administrative Assistant. Her name is Rosario. I think I will be telling a lot of stories that include her. She has become important in my life way beyond what the job title suggested.

First and foremost, my dear Rosario was charged with the task of helping me get my piles and piles of disorganized papers in order. Right away she got me going in a direction that is certain to not only de-clutter my reams and reams of papers, buried one on top of the other since the day I lost my eyesight, Labor Day weekend, 1998, but also transform my life.

Now already in progress!

On that vast upheaval and great turning point day of my life, I was working from one to the other on my three Random House manuscripts, known now as my "Random House Trilogy." Almost three thousand manuscript pages were, thus, strewn all over my living roon floor! Almost seventeen years later I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of it all and straightened it into any reasonable working order.

But now, thanks to Rosario, I am well on my way, much to the delight of those who love me and are close to me. My Rosario is truly magic in my life!

So it has come to be that, again thanks to Rosario, I am finally sorting out my unfiled papers all the way back to the beginning of my beautiful career in 1966!  And, of course, yearning for an opportunity to put the highlights of this magical journey of healing and unfolding that I have been on ever since into book form.

That’s what Hot Pants, Motorcycles and K Street is about; the magical journey of my personal healing and unfolding! And – what this incredible life adventure has taught me about society and politics that those three still unpublished books represent.

The magic Rosario brought is that now we are in the process of creating an archives in countless notebooks of my work and creative efforts all the way back to the beginning with samples of the most important pieces.  When finished we will have the start of an entire library that can be used to educate and help train those to come.

Today, we are up to almost twenty-five, mostly gigantic, notebooks!

Most delicious for me is that in the process of this endeavor I am retrieving parts of me that had been lying unseen for all the years of my blindness and recovery from the ordeal. 

What a celebration! I am celebrating me and my life!  (Next year I may do it with a party!)

I also celebrated my life and me over the week-end while many others around me were celebrating Nelson Mandela’s birth-day. It just happens that I share my birth-day with that venerable man!  Isn’t that delectable too!

Our notebook project, in fact, “feels” like it is bringing me into the final stages (if there can be such a thing which I doubt) of my recovery from blindness.

Long forgotten parts of me, most of them interconnected with loved ones, are showing up in what was a mess of papers and files. Thus a paper trail of my life and work is emerging right before my eyes that now see magnificently with restored vision.

“Anastasia” which means “she who rises again” is rising again before my very eyes as I find myself, day-by-day and moment-by-moment, in a notebook.

What a miracle!!