Falling In Love With Everything

This book is about a lot of things, including the word, “everything,” but basically it is a book I am writing to save my life, save my sanity, and maybe offer some help to you as you save your life and save your sanity. Maybe not. This is a how-to book about staying alive, staying alive in the literal sense of keeping my heart beating and my breath easing in and out, and eating and sleeping and getting along in life, but also staying alive in the sense of truly living, not grunting through life as though it were some terrible burden, but dancing, singing, playing wide, smiling, laughing, kissing, hugging, embracing the full glory, seeing the miraculous in everything, treating life like a chocolate sundae with a cherry on top. I hope it works for me, and if you need it, I hope it works for you, but I am not writing it primarily for you. I’ve tried writing books for other people, and it hasn’t worked so well. I like what Seymour told Buddy Glass in “Seymour, An Introduction,” by J.D. Salinger. He said we, as readers, are to fix in our minds the one piece of writing we would most want to read, and then “sit down shamelessly and write the thing ourselves.” That is my intention with this book. As I’ve already mentioned, I owe my mother. She is almost the sanest, funniest person I know. Sanity and laughter are very close kin. They are like siblings, or even really hot lovers, lovers who can’t keep their hands off each other. You show me sane people, and I’ll show you people who can laugh at themselves. Jack Benny comes to mind. Tinkerbell Starbelly comes to mind. This book is a thinly veiled love letter to my shy friend who inspired it, the woman I once hoped would fall so madly in love with me that she couldn’t keep her hands off me. But this book is also about Tinkerbell Starbelly, a woman I adore who has successfully kept her hands off me for 15 years. To say that Tinkerbell Starbelly is a woman I adore, does her such a disservice. That sounds like I am mooshy, gooshy in love with her, and although I am, that barely scratches the surface of how much I love her. She is the author or co-author of five wonderful books, has been anthologized in at least four more, has two cds of her original songs, one spoken-word cd on the market, has traveled widely reading, singing, and preaching in Unitarian churches and other places. Bill Sinkford, who is the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, once called her, “Our Molly Ivins.” She’s better than that. She’s more like our Bob Dylan. You think I’m kidding? I’m not. She is the sanest, funniest person I know. My mother would be second.