Marathon

Like you, I like to finish what I start, and like you, I feel frustrated when that doesn’t happen.

I had “one of those days” last Sunday.

I created a fundraising event for my Boston Marathon/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute run.

I was going to write a novel in a single day at Brookline Booksmith, a truly outstanding bookstore here in the town where I live, Brookline, Massachusetts.

The bookstore was extremely cooperative and gave me all the space I needed to set up a big desk.

The media was cooperative — we had reporters from the Boston Globe and the Brookline Tab who decided to “embed” themselves and stick with me for the full 12 hours.

We even had a film crew of students from Boston University.

My son, Walter, set up the technology so that I could sit and type on my laptop and people in the bookstore could read what I was writing on a TV screen to my left.

It was pretty funny. Everybody assumed that the reporter from the Globe was the runner, because she’s much younger and, well, looked like a runner.

I think I look like a novelist.

But the mistaken identity notwithstanding, the real problem was that I came down with the flu the day before.

I gave strong thought to cancelling, but I woke up feeling well enough and decided that it just made sense to get it done as best I could.

The store was expecting me, the media was showing up, and, what the heck. I’ve powered through worse, I figured.

But by 3 o’clock, it was clear that I had nothing left in the tank.

The deal was that anybody could make a donation to my Dana-Farber fundraising page and in exchange, make a suggestion about the novel.

They could suggest plot twists, character names or traits, locations, or whatever they wanted.

It was actually pretty fun.

I was about 22 pages in when I realized that I just had no ability to go further.

By that moment, you had a man and a woman meeting in a bookstore on a blind date. They went downstairs to hear a lecture. They snuck off to the employees-only section and became intimate.

I’m being delicate because kids read this thing.

She went on her way, but he remained at the location of their tryst, quite dead.

Stabbed through the heart.

One person — an observer hanging around the bookstore — had noticed the couple meeting, but for his own reasons, chose not to share anything he knew with the police, who swarmed the place.

And that’s where matters lay when I came to the realization that I needed to go home and get back in bed.

Mission un-accomplished.

So I packed it in. The Globe ultimately decided not to run the story, but the Tab did, and that was very nice. The main thing is that we brought in a few hundred dollars for Dana-Farber. Not exactly what I was hoping for, only being there for half a day, but it was something.

The story would end there except for the fact that I wrote an article published on FoxNews.com/opinion about the event, and some folks from around the country reached out to contribute.

One of them was a woman named Lara Mashek. She made a donation. She wrote that Sarah and Elizabeth, her 10 and 12 year old daughters, would like to be in the book. They are from Oklahoma. She also wanted me to know that her husband and mother-in-law were both cancer survivors, and that they really appreciated what I was doing.

So thank you, Lara, Sarah, and Elizabeth.

I also got a call from a person that did not leave a name. That person’s suggestion was to put the book in Mingo Junction, Ohio, her father’s birthplace. Her father was born in Mingo Junction 106 years ago. That person also appreciated what I was doing.

So to Lara, Sarah, and Elizabeth in Oklahoma, and my anonymous friend whose father was born in Mingo Junction, I want to acknowledge you for your thoughtfulness and your donation.

If I had stayed well enough, then I would have included you guys in the book because it would have gone to the finish line.

So I hope that you can forgive me and that being mentioned in the article, which will go to my list as well as being published on medium.com, will be enough.

There’s still time to donate. If you’d like to support my Boston Marathon run, you can donate to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute by clicking here.

I might not have gotten to the finish line in my marathon writing session, but nothing will keep me from the finish line of the Boston Marathon this April 15.