Just recently people have started asking me, “Whatever happened to your new book The Ghosts of Good Intentions? Whatever happened to the revised edition of The Driveway Diaries?”

They’re going to be launched at the Burlington Book Festival! Both of them!

I’m giving a reading from both books in Speeder and Earl’s on Pine Street at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, September 26th.

The theme of the event is TALES FROM NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO.
For more than twenty years, I was one of National Public Radio’s most popular and prolific essayists, writing humor, social commentary, reflections on life on a dirt road in Vermont and stories of my family and my upbringing in that strange island called England. My essays were ordered on old-fashioned cassette tape, archived and downloaded, bounced around the Internet, taught in college writing classes and, in one case, cited in a tongue-in-cheek lawsuit by a driver who nearly drove off the road from laughing so hard.

At the Burlington Book Festival, I will launch two books drawing from my NPR writing: an expanded second edition of the cult classic The Driveway Diaries and an entirely new collection, an autobiography, mostly in fragments of two minutes and fifteen seconds, entitled The Ghosts of Good Intentions.

I will read from both books and tell stories of life in the heyday of NPR. Secrets will be revealed, improbable truths told. Don’t touch that dial.

Both books will be on sale at the reading, and as soon as I get my e-commerce act together, can be ordered from this website.

Remember the scene in the first Men in Black film where the bug man jams his flying saucer into the exterminator’s van and drives off in search of the Universe?
Well, the good news is that I’ve carved and painted the Tibetan tabletop and my colleague The Other Tim has taken it back to his shop to add beautifully-crafted legs.
But in his pickup, it did look like a flying saucer…

The text, as you may recall, is based on the wonderful Buddhist calligraphy of Tashi Mannox. It reads “graceful kindness,” repeated six times, so it acts as a kind of mantra.
In theory. To be honest I know very little about Buddhism or mantras. But that’s the intent.

Anyway, we had to wait for a break in this rain, which is doing wonderful things for my new plantings but would not be kind to the tabletop, but finally we had a clear, bright, early-summer day, and it was time for me to say goodbye to the item that, like a stylish wooden alien, has been occupying most of my house for the past six weeks.

And one of the great pleasures of that absence is that finally I could see the original Endangered Alphabets table again.
For those of you who don’t know it, it’s still one of my favorite creations. Maple and walnut, and in the top I carved a blessing I wrote and had translated into Balinese.
It reads:

Bless this food
Bless these people
Bless the table
That brought them together.