When Girl was little, every week we’d go to storytime at the library across the street from her preschool. It’s a small library but it had a GREAT kids section. For four years it was our weekly outing. And then Girl started kindergarten and her school was in the opposite direction and it was just easier to check books out at the school library.

On Saturday Girl and I took a trip. We drove that winding, curvy road to the little library tucked across the street from where she used to go to preschool.

It was such a lovely feeling to park in the spot we used to park in each week. Girl looked over at me, smiled and said, “Our parking spot.” We walked up that sidewalk we’d tramped up so many times before and shared another smile when we passed the storytime room.

It had been several, several years but one of our favorite librarians was still there. She recognized me and gave both of us a hug. Not surprising, she said she wouldn’t have recognized Girl. Girl was a little pete the last time we were there and she’s now at least four inches taller than I am.

I can’t even tell you how great it was to revisit a place that held so many good memories for us. I renewed my card and we checked out several books. We’ll be back.

What about you? Any friends or places you’ve recently reacquainted yourself with?

Tonight Girl is going to her first evening birthday party with mixed company. 7-10 p.m. Boys and girls. Of course the parents (whom I’ve only met twice) are going to be there and it’s at a clubhouse but… I’m not ready for this. Wonder how embarrassed she’d be if I stayed there?

…pull our heads out of our collective asses?

The first time I heard this I was outraged, the second time I was enraged, now…I’m just beyond both.

In March 2005 a man was being retried for rape in Fulton County (Atlanta for y’all outside of the area). Okay, folks, we’re already off to an auspicious beginning. Anyway, this man overpowers the sheriff’s deputy, seizes her weapon, kills the judge and the court reporter, and kills a sheriff’s deputy on his way out. In the parking garage he pistol whips a reporter which is captured on video tape (parking garage tape). This man flees and later in the day shoots and kills a federal agent and we know this because the dead federal agent’s vehicle was at the location where the *suspect* was eventually apprehended when he took a woman hostage and told her everything he’d done (not the rape but the earlier killings).

None of this is supposition. Witnesses. Captured on tape. Dead man’s car in suspect’s possession. Confession to third party. Now here is the part that just slays me…the state of Georgia has already spent 1.2 million dollars on this man’s defense. They say they need more money.

Does anyone else find this the most asinine waste of taxpayer dollars when there are children in our fair city who go hungry every day? 1.2 million and counting to say what, that all the people that saw what happened didn’t really see it? That the video tape lied? That the terrified woman who was kidnapped and listened to his story and eventually talked him into turning himself in didn’t really hear or experience any of that?

Pardon me while I go take a couple of ibuprofen. This just makes my head ache.

Hey, I’m over at the Soapbox Queens where I’m putting out an SOS.

I go into the bathroom this morning and flip the light switch. A bulb blows over the vanity.

I come downstairs and turn on the kitchen light. A bulb blows in the ceiling fan light.

Next, my office. Turn on the floor lamp…you got it. The bulb blows.

Freaky, huh?

What is it about funerals? I’m not a frequent funeral-goer because luckily I’m still not at the age where my friends and/or their family members are dropping like flies. But there’s some weird karma-thing going on with funerals for my neighbor’s parents and me.

A couple of years ago I went to a wake for a former neighbor’s father. We’re going through an informal buffet in the dining room when I notice it’s my neighbor’s sister and her husband ahead of me in the buffet. I reintroduce myself, and to put myself in context remind her we’d met a couple of times before since I’d lived next door to her brother and his family for over a decade, and I extend my condolences to her over the loss of her father.

I think she worked for T. Rowe Price or some other fancy schmancy financial group but she was obviously feeling professionally superior.

“Aren’t you the one who writes those trash books?” she asks, bringing her own context to the conversation.

I’m sort of stunned so I say, “I write romance for Harlequin.”

“Yeah. Those trashy books. Are you any good at it?”

Let me pause in the recounting to say we were not the only ones in the room. At this point, the half-dozen or so people serving themselves around the dining room table have stopped to listen.

My initial, gut response was to tell her if she’d give me a sec to put my plate down, I’d help her remove the stick that was obviously up her ass. I also came precariously close to offering condolences to her husband for being saddled with a wife who considered sex trashy.

Instead, I reminded myself this wasn’t about me. This was a wake honoring her father, whom I’d shared several meals with over the span of the last ten years. I also reminded myself I was a guest in my neighbor’s home and his sister was already making an ass of herself without me adding to the scene.

So…I smiled and made a joke, “I must be good enough. They keep offering me contracts.”

I’d like to say her grief had overwhelmed her good manners but that wasn’t the case, she was simply a beyotch.

That was a couple of years ago.

Yesterday I went to the funeral home to pay my respects to another neighbor whose father passed away on Friday.

I speak quietly in the hall outside the viewing room with my neighbor who then asks if I’d like to meet her brother who is here from the mid-west. Alright. She takes me into the funeral home’s kitchen where about a dozen strangers are gathered around two long tables.

She says in a very loud voice, which quiets the room, “This is Jennifer. She’s famous. She writes books. She’s working on her eighteenth book now.”

Ho-ly hell! Would the floor just open up and swallow me about now?

I mumble a disclaimer to the group at large that I’m not famous, mentally try to work out whether it’s book 17 or 18 I’m working on while I’m wondering how she knows when I don’t, grab her brother’s hand and shake it and say, “I’m so sorry about your dad.”

He looks at me and asks, totally ignoring my sorry-for-your-loss spiel, “You write under your own name? Are you any good?”

Whatta ya say to THAT? Why do people keep asking me that? What do they expect me to say? What am I supposed to say?

“No, I’m Nora Friggin’ Roberts and I’m better than good, buddy! I’m friggin’ great. I’m the queen of the printed word!”

However, being brain-dead and perhaps a bit dull-witted in general I fall back on my standard joke. “I write under my own name. I guess I’m okay. They’re still buying my books.”

Now, I’m not so naive that I believe this. There are lots of unpublished writers who are far better than I am who simply haven’t gotten a break. But I always fall back on this line because I don’t know what else to say.

At least he didn’t tag me with writing “trash.”

Honest to God, it’s never occurred to me to ask people if they’re good at what they do but I must be missing out on something here.

And the next time I’m heading out to a wake or funeral visitation I’m going to pin a tag to the front of my dress:

I write romance. Go buy one, read it and decide for yourself if I’m any good or not.

“A synonym is the word you use when you can’t spell the word you first thought of.” Burt Bacharach

I’m chatting over at Soapbox Queens today. Click over and join me.