Stevie Wonder Can Do It

At the Inauguration I watched Stevie Wonder perform. I was simply in awe of the way he sang, played the piano, went to the harmonica, and moved his head from side-to-side while keeping the crowd in a frenzy. I thought of the fact that I can't pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time. And he's blind!

As I walked into the Awards Ceremony at the New England Book Festival, I felt really out of place - first off, I had decent clothes on and I hardly ever wear those, but not to disappoint, I wore tennis shoes with the dress pants. You expected perfection?

There was a man in the corner of the room playing the guitar, song after song, strumming the notes perfectly. He wasn't singing, just setting the mood. I marveled at how talented he was.

Three minutes later, I was talking with True Crime author M. William Phelps. I had read three or four of his books, and we immediately hit it off, discussing characters, the fact that we both hated the DaVinci Code, and how difficult it is to garner a top spot.

For the next few hours, we traded secrets, spoke of serial killers (he'd interviewed about a dozen of them) and talked about the difference between being a writer in New York as opposed to Buffalo.

One by one, we received our awards and made a speech about the book we were being honored for - it was an intimate setting and there was very little pretending because we had all been through the war, and we were all happy to be honored in front of our peers. Of course, I had no idea that they might ask me to speak, so they received a Heineken Light recap of why I wrote Nobody's Home and the family that was the basis for the story.

As I walked back to my seat, I thought - Man, I pulled it off.

Yet the emcee for the event read a letter explaining that there had been hundreds and hundreds of entries in the categories, and it was then that it dawned on me: I can barely pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time, but for one night, I belonged there - tennis shoes and all.