Sometime in 2007 I agreed to be the keynote speaker at a Writers’ Conference in Boise, Idaho, in June of 2008.  In May of 2008, Bill’s bi-lateral knee replacement surgery, which had originally been scheduled for August, got moved up to June.  His new hospital/rehab stay was right in the middle of the conference.  I told my daughters, “I’m going to call the people in Boise, tell them my husband is in the hospital, and say I won’t be able to attend.”

What did my daughters say?  “You keep your promise and go to Boise.  We’ll look after Dad.”  It is SO annoying when your children grow up and start spouting back to you all the things you used to say to them!  As a result, and muttering under my breath, I went to Boise, and the girls looked after Bill.

I was six feet tall in seventh grade.  I was smart.  I wore thick glasses.  Any one of those conditions can turn someone into a social misfit in junior high and high school.  I had all three, and believe me, I was not high on anyone’s prom dance card.  Then, years later, I happened to hear Janis Ian’s iconic song—”At Seventeen”

I learned the truth at seventeen

That love was meant for beauty queens

And high school girls with clear-skinned smiles

Who married young and then retired.

Boy did I relate!  That was my teenaged life in a nutshell, because:

Dreams were all they gave for free

To ugly duckling girls like me.

Once I started doing live-audience events in my forties, those haunting lyrics became my theme song, and I often ended presentations by singing it.  And that’s exactly what I did in Boise in June of 2008—I finished my keynote speech by singing Janis’s song.  Sunday night, when I got home from the conference, I opened my computer to find an email from Janis Ian.

“Hey,” she said. “I hear you sang my song in Boise this weekend and that you did a good job of it!”

Astonishingly enough, that was the beginning of my now almost twenty-year friendship with Janis Ian.  I count it as one of the miracles of my career as a writer.

Years later, at an event in Newport News, Virginia, a woman came up to the stage before the program started and said, “You put my husband’s name in your book.”  I was visiting in Virginia, but I was living in Washington state. It didn’t seem possible that I knew her husband.  

“I did?” I said.

“Yes,” she answered,”my husband, Joe Kenda.”

I had been a devoted follower of Joe Kenda’s TV show Homicide Hunter for years, and that was why I put his name in a Beaumont book.  The two of them have always seemed to be birds of a feather.

I said, stupidly, “You’re married to Joe Kenda?”

She replied, “Yes, he’s right over there.”

She pointed, and sure enough, there he was in the flesh!  What followed was an amazing fan-girl introduction as well as several photo ops, and Kathy and Joe Kenda now count as friends as well.  I’ve often said that those two friendships—the one with Janis and Pat and the other with Joe and Kathy are two of the highlights of my life.

This past Sunday I received an email from a man in Mesa.  He said his wife, who recently passed away, had been a huge fan of the Joanna Brady books.  One year, as an anniversary present, he had treated her to a weekend at the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee, where they signed up for a Pink Jeep tour so they could become better acquainted with the area.  

By pure coincidence Bill and I happened to be in Bisbee that weekend, showing some grandkids around. To make things easier, we ended up scheduling the same Pink Jeep Tour.  When I stepped inside the vehicle, the woman was so surprised that she almost fell out of her seat.

And that’s why her widowed husband wrote to me last week—to thank me for that meeting which his late wife had always considered to be one of the highlights of her life.

See what I mean?  What goes around really does come around.