WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

Today I’m welcoming guest blogger, Peggy Webb, to My Kitchen Table. At the RWA conference recently events occurred that that shed new light on the entire conference experience for Peggy. Ones that shifted priorities. I was moved by it and asked her permission to share this here. Peggy granted it.

When Things Go Wrong

©2010, Peggy Webb


Everybody I know starts planning for the RWA conference weeks in advance.

You make appointments with agents and editors, make plans to reconnect with long-distance friends, buy plane tickets or plan a fun road trip, shop for the perfect clothes, and agonize over which shoes to wear so you’ll look good without killing your feet. You scroll down the long list of workshops, note the ones you want to attend. If you’re lucky enough to be a presenter, you put together handouts and enough notes to sound intelligent but not so many that you don’t sound off-the-cuff. If you’re really organized, you create a day planner for the convention – one small enough for a purse - so you can see your personal schedule at a glance.

You make arrangements for the dogs and kids you leave behind, the husbands and boyfriends and aging parents. You sign out of church choirs, tell the mailman to hold the newspaper, tell the post office to hold the mail, tell the neighbor to water the herb garden and harvest the tomatoes.

Finally the big day arrives and you head off to Orlando full of high spirits and big plans. If you’re already published, you’re going to blow your editor away with your brilliance. She’s going to salivate to send you on book tour and give you a huge print run and put you on the Today Show. If you’re unpublished, you get your pitches ready, perfect the hook, figure just the right angle so that you will rise above the masses and come away the chosen one.

But what if things go wrong? What if you’re a thousand miles from home, the conference is just getting into swing and your best friend has to be taken to ER? What if she has to stay?

You stay with her. You hold her hand. You assure her everything is going to be all right. You pray that it will.

Suddenly the meetings in your day planner no longer seem important. While your friend is in x-ray you call your agent and ask her to contact your editor to please explain why you won’t be at the luncheon. You call your friend’s agent and tell her the same thing. You call your friend’s family and tell them what happened. You pester doctors and nurses for answers. You pray some more.

When your friend comes back from x-ray you bathe her face with a wet cloth. You ask for an extra blanket to cover her feet. You go to the water fountain and call another friend to see if she will please present the workshop that by now you know you can’t.

You go back to your friend and the nurse shoos you out. You update the family again. You call to make sure plans are going forward for the workshop without you. You find a vending machine in a hospital you don’t know but that you believe was designed by the Devil. You get a bag of chips for lunch. You hurry back because the doctor is coming (FINALLY!!!) and if you miss him you just might kill somebody.

He’s not there, but your friend is worried about the workshop, because she was supposed to be a presenter, too. She has you call the dear-friend-sub and tell her to get the handouts from your room. The front desk at the hotel won’t let her in without your permission, so you call them, too, and make arrangements. It’s like coordinating the train schedule at Grand Central Station.

Your nerves are shot. You’re worried sick. Your stomach rumbles, signaling starvation. You believe that both you and your dear friend are half dead. You pray that you are not. In spite of the fact that she’s the one on the gurney, her spirits are high. Yours are not. Your feet hurt, your asthma meds are back at the room, you’re still worried sick, you think the staff in this hospital was trained by chimpanzees and you might just bite somebody’s head off. You don’t because you’re from Mississippi and contrary to what some people expect you know how to smile and say, “That’s precious,” when you really want to use language you read on bathroom walls.

You’ve now been in ER with your friend for nearly eight hours and it’s obvious they’re going to keep her. You tell her family and you wonder if things would have turned out differently if you’d pitched a hissy fit and insisted they transfer your friend to a hospital designed by God where the nursing staff would get her something cool to drink without you having to threaten to cast yourself on the floor in front of the desk. A hospital with doctors who show their faces, for Pete’s sake! You’re aware that your civility is slipping a tad.

Maybe you’ll write a book about it. Maybe you and your dearest friend in all the world will plan another workshop at another conference. You’ll tell how to arm yourself with phone numbers instead of cute shoes – the numbers for your roommate’s family and her family doctor, her agent, her editor, another writer she knows at the conference but you do not.

You’ll tell how to put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door of your hotel room so that no one will come in and leave a trap behind for you, - a little puddle of water on your bathroom floor, a wastebasket out of place that you might trip over, a wet spot on your foyer.

You’ll tell how to take extra cash in case you need to ferry back and forth from the hotel to a strange hospital run by Godzilla in a taxi that charges two arms and a leg every time you set foot in it.

You’ll make sure that if you plan a road trip, both of you know where the car is parked. Both of you will be comfortable driving it. Both of you will be capable of driving home alone if necessary.

But most of all you will tell that friends are more important than conferences. That there will be many more meetings and workshops and extravagant parties and agent appointments, but there is only one of your dear friend. And she’s worth every sacrifice.❖


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Peggy’s website: www.peggywebb.com



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Blessings,

Vicki

Published with full permission of author, Peggy Webb.