“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,”
BY MOTHER GOOSE
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
After the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, I feel like Humpty Dumpty. Nothing has sorted out my brain. Rest, exercise, contemplation haven’t helped. Sitting in a dark quiet room and listening to my blocking-Beta-wave music hasn’t balanced my introverted self. It is still hard to focus and items from the conference are everywhere. Clutter bugs me. I close my eyes as I walk by to fold a load of clothes or go to the kitchen to fix myself another PB&J sandwich.
Of course, the people made the conference, and I met many interesting people. An English woman living in Japan sat with me at lunch, but the noise in the auditorium was so loud I couldn’t hear most of her answers to my questions. Otto Penzler spoke after the luncheon about how he helped to make mystery writers’s stories respected and revered by establishing Mysterious Press and the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City in the 1970s.
After my name and work were read with a yawn by the presenter, who read the long list of cozy-writer nominees at the award banquet, an author and lawyer from Kansas, William Mott, PSEUD. Leonard Ruhl, made me laugh. I didn’t win the Silver Falchion Award for “Another Kind of Hero”, but I was in good company. Thanks, Bill.
Reading the nursery rhymes below gives me a strange sense of wellbeing. Maybe, I’ll read Mother Goose poems for the next couple of days until I feel better. I do enjoy the faded pictures in my copies, and the smell of the pages as I turn them.
- “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”
- “Hey, diddle diddle”
- “Hickory dickory, dock”
For info about the origin of Mother Goose https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mother-goose