Encountering brilliance

The novelist, Richard Bausch said this last night (at the Wisconsin Book Festival: thank you so much for taking me to it):
So this writer goes up to his cabin in Minnesota to sequester himself, to make some progress on his writing and the first week he’s there, he sees that the plumbing isn’t working. His toilet is completely backed up and overflowing in the way that country cesspools and toilets sometimes get, causing regurgitation and spillage of the contents onto the bathroom floor. And so he is forced to call a plumber to fix this. The plumber, wading virtually ankle-deep through the stuff that is now flowing freely from the toilet, is working diligently to put a stop to it. In the meantime he asks the man in the cabin “so, you’re the guy who’s a writer from Minneapolis?” Yes, the writer fellow answers. The plumber grunts in wonderment and says “I don’t know how you folks can do that kind of work!”

I am glad that writers, bloggers too, have, at the least, the admiration of plumbers.

I spoke to Bausch briefly after the reading, in the nervous way that one does when talking to one’s heroes and gods and of course he could tell by the buckets of sweat that were dripping down my forehead that I was an aspiring, errrr, plumber (or something). And so, like probably for the millions that come to his signing table, shyly, with goose-bumps and some asinine two or three chatty lines that they took forever to think of, he wrote this: