Last Sunday, due to a long time friendship with Penny Holland who lives at the Quailpark Retirement Community in Lynnwood, Washington, I was invited to do an event there. I’ve done many retirement community talks over the years, but this one was striking.  For one thing, at this stage of the game, I have a lot more in common with the residents than I used to. There were plenty of canes, walkers, and wheelchairs in evidence. In other words, not only was I in a room full of contemporaries, I was also in a room full of friends.

Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park had kindly agreed to handle book sales, and they showed up with a wagonload of books stacked two boxes tall.  There were copies of my latest book, Overkill, as well as an assortment of backlist titles, including 20 or so copies of my book of poetry, After the Fire.  (You’re probably thinking poetry?  Are you kidding?  Nobody reads poetry much less buys it. If those are the words going through your head, trust me.  You’re wrong!)

But back to the event.  I didn’t expect much of a turnout, but I was mistaken. It was a large room.  When I arrived there were probably seventy chairs already set up.  As more and more people appeared, so did more chairs.  I think the attendance was somewhere around 125.

There were plenty of J.A. Jance old-timers in the crowd—people who had come to those early signings at the Doghouse when fans lined up around the block, waiting to come inside the restaurant.  For the record and for those who aren’t Seattle natives, the Doghouse was a Seattle institution.  For decades, it operated on a 24-hour basis. It was a dodgy kind of place which, in the early hours of the morning operated as a neutral zone where both the good guys (the cops) and the bad guys could gather for an inexpensive meal and a cup of coffee or, depending on the hour, something stronger.  A prominently displayed sign offered this warning, “Tenderness of the steaks is NOT guaranteed.”  In other words, eat at your own risk.  

The Doghouse’s sole non-smoking table was located in the middle of an otherwise smoke-filled room.  When Bill and I began dating, he was from Bellevue, and I lived in the Denny Regrade in downtown Seattle.  When I took him to Mama’s Mexican Kitchen for the first time, the colorfully attired customers assembled there made him think he’d accidentally stumbled into a bar from Star Trek.  As for the Doghouse?  The first time I took my new main-squeeze–an electronics engineer—there, he was appalled by the multitude of extension cords running this way and that.

The Quailpark talk wasn’t so much a new book event as it was a reunion with folks many of whom have been fans all along, so the stories I told went from soup to nuts. The one that garnered the biggest laugh was Doghouse-related.  As you can imagine, the waitress who worked there were tough as nails, and more than one of them carried a racing form in the pocket of her apron. They were known to be surly under the best of circumstances, and those book signing nights, when the place was jammed to the gills all night long, were NOT the best of circumstances. At that point they could be downright fierce.

Once the last of those ended, the J.A.Jance sales/promotion crew repaired to the back room for dinner.  One of the guests, someone who was transitioning away from red meat, ordered the salmon.  When the waitress brought our food, she was carrying a load of platters stacked from her chin to her fingertips, and she slid the platters across the table like cards being dealt in a poker game.  When a platter stopped in front of our would-be salmon eater, she looked down at her food in dismay and said aloud, “This doesn’t look like salmon.”  “It’s ham,” the waitress snapped back at her.  “We’re out of salmon!” No one dared sending the food back because by then it was clearly an  “eat it or wear it” moment.

By the way, on book tours over the years I’ve met more than one retired Doghouse waitress.  The last one was at a book festival in Kentucky.  It’s always fun to share a moment with someone from that dauntless collection of ladies.

During Sunday’s event, I told about some of the obstacles that stood in the way of my becoming a writer, including my marriage to a first husband who told me early on that there was only going to be one writer in our family, and he was it.  That’s why I wrote poetry while I was married to him—I wasn’t allowed to write books.  After his death on New Year’s Eve of 1982, I was astonished when the poems I’d been writing under the cover of darkness for the previous fifteen years actually turned into a book, a chapbook called After the Fire, which was first published in 1984.  A more recent edition of that book, complete with essays telling what was going on in my life as I wrote each of the poems has been in print in hardback for more than a decade.

My first husband died of chronic alcoholism at age forty-two, a year and a half after I divorced him.  For years I had been holding my finger in the dike, trying to keep him from killing himself with booze, but once I was gone, his situation worsened. When his mother came to visit over Thanksgiving of 1982, he attempted to sober up while she was there by going off booze cold turkey.  On Thanksgiving night he was found lying in the street in Tempe, Arizona.  At first the cops thought he was the victim of a hit and run, but once he arrived at the ER, doctors discovered he had gone into DTs.  He was hospitalized with no liver or kidney function and died more than a month later.

Sunday afternoon, along with the laughter, I shared two poems from After the Fire that focus on what it’s like to lose a spouse after divorcing them.  The first one was a phone call my mother-in-law begged me to make to my former husband’s doctors when she couldn’t get a straight answer from them.  It’s called Death Sentence.

He’s dying.

Words come through the wire and hammer home

Despite the doctor’s cloying, unctuous tone.

He’s dying.

I thought my tears exhausted years ago,

And yet it hurts, oh God, how much it hurts!

He’s dying.

This is what I wanted when I thought a widow’s garb

Would suit me better than a court’s decree.

He’s dying.

Should I go to him or stay away?

What right have I to be there now?

He’s dying.

I’ll go.

The second one is about that last night I spent with him, New Year’s Eve, 1982.  It’s called Vigil.

We keep a vigil by his midnight bed,

His mother and his former wife,

Grieving for the man we loved and lost.

It’s harder for his mother than for me.

I’ve already known the sting of loss.

She’s only now begun to see she cannot win.

He’s quiet now.  A nurse comes in to loosen his restraints,

Not looking at the women waiting there.

She knows.  She doesn’t want to say.

The hours creep by.  All stories are expended,

Yet we need some sound to hold the night at bay.

“Please sing,” his mother asks me, and I do.

It is a serenade of love,

Of songs we knew and treasured through the years,

From bawdy barroom ditties to sweet hymns.

The hours flow by.  We hold his hands.

I sing a line and wait to see if he will breathe again.

He doesn’t.  It’s over.  Amen.

On Sunday afternoon, after reading those two poems and because I knew there were plenty of people in that room who had lived that life and who were also second-time-arounders—I went on to tell the rest of that story, about how, by doing a poetry reading of that book at a widowed retreat in 1985, I met and married my second husband, Bill.  In other words, After the Fire, is not only my first published book, it’s also my most important.

After the talk it was time for the signing.  One woman, Martha, showed up with a first edition of Until Proven Guilty signed in blue ink.  I signed it for her again, this time in red.  (By the way, I noticed that my penmanship back in 1985 was much better than it is now!)

Another woman arrived at the signing table accompanied by both her son and grandson.  She told me she’d never been to an event where the audience was shedding tears one minute and laughing the next.  It turns out, she was also someone who showed up at those long ago Doghouse signings.

By the way, when the event was over there were exactly two unsold books—copies of After the Fire, as it happens, but all the others were gone, including one copy of After the Fire purchased by a young woman—a twenty-something–who happens to be a published poet with two books out and a degree from the U Dub who’s never read ANY of my books.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I love doing live events.  It’s great to be among friends, new ones and old ones alike.