Shameless Plug

when Sarah had become a much-published, much-honored novelist and I was the long-suffering book drudge for The Dallas Morning News, struggling to get the paper to give serious treatment to historical monographs on the stunting influence of Icky Twerp on the intellectual growth of Dallas-Fort Worth children, the two of us looked back on that felix culpa, that happy fall, those bruises and scrapes and the emergency operation on my compound leg fracture aggravated by gangrenous coyote bites -- and we chuckled affectionately.

It was a phone call I remember with tenderness. Sarah was on another one of her glamorous author tours, jetting through Dallas-Fort Worth after signing books in London, Bombay and Hollywood and had bothered to call me up in my shabby, dusty, book-crowded cubicle with the battered old Underwood that always needed a new typewriter ribbon..

Was it, I couldn't dare to hope, was it to see if we might perhaps ... share a little toy-boat-bobbing water again?

No, actually, Sarah just wanted me to give her novel a shameless plug and her bookstore appearance a glowing advance, the better to generate public interest and peddle a few more copies. I gulped. Haltingly, I explained that as a miserable book critic, my professional ethics dictated that I could never review the book of a friend -- let alone a companion in near-death wading-pool-hillside tumbles.

There was a silence on Sarah's end.

"You mean," she squawked, "I've endured you for 20 years solely in the hope of some publicity payoff, some feeble shred of newsprint attention, and this is what I get? It was hard enough putting up with your wandering stories about newspaper management, your pathetic jokes about other authors that everyone's already heard, and your scrounging for tortilla chip crumbs at my house parties, but now -- to learn it was all for nothing?"

She groaned and the line went dead.

So now, the lovely, amusing, talented, glossy-magazine-published Sarah is coming through town once again, supporting another highly-praised comic confection, and I know I will be there when she walks out to the lights of news cameras and flashbulbs popping, strides past the long line waiting along the velvet rope, heads to her author's table with its stacks of books to be signed and the swarm of eagerly helpful publicity assistants standing by. I will know that for our love-that-dare-not-wiggle-too-much-in-wading-pools I have done my tiny part to memorialize it, to honor it.

By making sure every link in this blog post is inaccurate. Except for one.