Monday, September 24th – This will be a busy day, ending with my first reading in Greenville, South Carolina. I drive to Charlotte that morning and meet with Amy Rogers, Novello’s Publisher. We talk over coffee at Starbucks. Afterwards, she gives me more boxes of books, some for the reading that night, some for two events later in the week: a talk in Charlotte on Thursday and the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance meeting in Atlanta on the weekend. The Atlanta event is important. There I will meet the people who will actually sell my book.

I leave Charlotte and drive to Gaffney, South Carolina, where my friend Sara is expecting me. She will go with me to Greenville and I will come back and spend the night with her in Gaffney. I park in her driveway and knock on her door, but she doesn’t answer. I see lights in the studio over the garage. Sara is an artist, preparing for a show in Spartanburg the next week. I climb the stairs and find her framing artwork. We talk while she works and later over the dinner she has fixed. She tells me her friend Lynne is going to Greenville with us.

We drive to Greenville and find the Handlebar Restaurant where the reading will be in an adjoining room. I’m surprised to see a bus unloading governor’s school kids in the parking lot. I had planned an opening line about how it isn’t often that we get to be a virgin again but tonight I am just that with my “maiden book” and “maiden reading.” Is that appropriate for high school students? I decide not to use the line and begin my reading with a silly story aimed at the high school kids about taking my children to a Broadway play that was more adult than they were. No one laughs and I believe I have begun badly. [Later my daughter, a high school Theater and English teacher, will tell me I failed to respect those students for their maturity and I know she is right – first lesson learned] I begin reading the novel’s opening pages. This goes better. I am into another section when I realize I can’t see all the words on the page — I’m having a migraine, in which I develop blind spots in my vision accompanied by an aura. It will last only 20 minutes and then I will be fine, so I keep reading. I find it more difficult to see the page. I make up words. This is not going well. Blessedly, my time is up. I find a seat to listen to poet Susan Meyers, who is sharing the reading with me. The migraine is not going away. When the readings are over, I try to talk to people but find I am having difficulty seeing. Perhaps because the reading room is so dark. I bump into tables and people. I need to get books from my car to sell, but I can’t find my car. Mike, the husband of one of the event organizers, goes with me, leading me into the parking lot, while I punch the buttons on my key chain to get my car lights to blink. I am having a migraine, I tell Mike. I explain that to my friends and others of the audience.

When the event ends, the migraine has still not cleared up. I am not able to drive. Lynne says she can drive my car to Gaffney. I am getting a headache, an unusual symptom for my particular kind of migraine. Sara asks if we should go by the Spartanburg Hospital Emergency Room. I don’t think so, I say. At her house in Gaffney, she asks me again and before I answer she finds a piece of paper and asks me questions about my symptoms. “You answered yes to two of these,” she says. “I’m calling the Rescue Squad.” I don’t argue. They arrive quickly and two nice young men lift me onto a gurney and into an ambulance. I soon find myself at the Gaffney hospital. They do a Cat-Scan and the doctor takes a look at it. Later I remember nothing of what he looks like. But I remember what he says: “This is bad. You’ve had a stroke and it’s bleeding.”