About 15 years ago, my cousin rented a house in Italy in the summer and invited me to come visit her. Dave couldn’t come for the whole time, but he agreed to show up for my 40th birthday, in the middle of the trip.
The morning
he was set to arrive, I woke up to an e-mail from him saying he was leaving his cell phone at home, but he would meet me at the closest train station to the house, in a town called Poggibonsi.
That same morning
I found out that there was no train station in Poggibonsi, or anywhere around the house for that matter. And, that one group of friends had taken the rental car we were planning to use, but there was a second rental car if only we could find the keys for it.
We eventually did,
and my cousin, who speaks Italian fluently, managed to find out that although there was no train station near the house, there was a bus station. We hopped in the car, going on pure instinct because we had not heard a thing from Dave since the Montreal email at least 15 hours prior.
We assumed that he made the flight,
that he landed. That he figured out he could not take a train. And, that he would be on the bus arriving very, very shortly at the bus station in Poggibonsi.
Except that there was no bus station
in Poggibonsi, we discovered when we got to the centro. There was, however, a bus stop, dustily located outside of town.
As we pulled over
to a shelter on the side of the road that might have once been a bus stop, I looked up and saw a bus coming down the road, with what looked like Dave chitchatting with the driver. I leapt out of the car, flagged the bus down, and that my friends, is how my 40th birthday started.
Persistence was required
for both of us. Dave, for getting off the plane for the first time in a country he knew nothing about, and having to figure out how to find me, with no access to a phone or the internet. I had to find the keys, find the bus stop, navigate to it and flag down the bus.
It only worked out
because we both calmly put one foot in front of the other, and had faith that the plan would come together.
Writers, listen to me.
You can’t give up. You have to keep writing and submitting your work. The difference between publishing and not publishing is your ability to look for a bus stop when there is no bus station. It’s up to you to figure out where your deficits are and to look for ways to improve your writing. You might need an online workshop. You might need to read a little more in your genre. You might need an accountability partner.
You might need to just keep calmly putting one foot in front of the other.
I have complete faith in you that everything is going to come together, you just have to keep going.
This is so very you. I'd have already started freaking out when he said he was leaving his phone at home unless he also said "but getting a cheap one at the airport and I'll call you from there."
Amy, I loved every word of this!