Setting sun, off the big barn window

   Went to the new Battenkill Bookshop on Main St., Cambridge, N.Y. Great bookstore. Will go back and put up some photos later in the week – my shots got messed up somehow. Reading the new Clint Eastwood biography, and also a P.D.James mystery. She is better than warm milk and tea at bedtime. Liking the Martin Beck mystery series. Got a call from a Hollywood agent. There is interest in optioning one of my mysteries, “Death By Station Wagon.”
  Most calls like that end up nowhere, but it was interesting, because the series is out-of-print and was abandoned by Doubleday after good reviews and tepid sales. I enjoyed writing them, but I don’t really have the patience to write about the same character over and again. That includes me.
  I wrote the mysteries primarily because my wife was working as a reporter, and I wanted to stay home and take care of my daughter. So I kept the calendar, shopped, cooked and carpooled. I have to say I loved that period of my life, even though I never really took to living in the suburbs. Writing, taking care of Em.
  People thought I was having a mid-life crisis, staying home like that. But then, people have been telling me that I’m having a mid-life crisis ever since I was eighteen. Whenever men change, they are clubbed with the idea that they are having a mid-life crisis. That’s what they said when I started writing, when I took up dogs and sheepherding, when I wrote about dogs, when I moved up to the farm. I hope that’s what they are saying when I croak, because it will mean that I was doing what I wanted to do, rather than what they expected me to do, till the end.