If you are following my newly instituted blog here's the big headline. THE BOOK is on Kindle.

It's been an interesting and arduous journey. Twelve months from first word to publication.

As with any long work, there have been stumbles and outright falls along the way, moments of "why am I doing this," or "my life sucks? you know, the usual stuff one goes through.

But, here it is, Der Tag, The Day. Maybe The Week would be closer. I have a couple of items to futx with before the big announcement. But on the brink.

 I'll put out the word in as many venues as I can churn up that my baby, child of my imaginings and experience, has left the fold, thrust into the world.

Which got me to thinking. Hard as it is to believe, I was a child once, a baby, and before that a gleam in my father's eye. Before that? molecules, atoms, quarks, earth, water, iron, selenium, potassium, a little lead, all sorts of various simple and complex scattered elements.

Fact is, I will be again. Out of the elements and back to them. No immortality band wagon for me. Just a few years too soon onto this green earth. Maybe fifty years later I'd have coalesced in my future mom's womb and been born into a world where gerontology, the study of aging, would have allowed me, oh, a couple of hundred years minimum to explore my life and the world.

But, life, however much of it we get, whether years or moments, or none at all is largely a matter of luck.

Fate? Not sure.

In my short time on the planet I have almost died, expired, been extinguished several times. Disease and accidents have almost shuffled me away into the infinitude, back to the elements more than once.

Destiny? I wish, but heck if I know.

A brief tale on this subject.

At Eighteen months, on my mom's birthday, my family drove to San Francisco for a day trip. I have no memory of what we did, if we beached it, or ate, or just drove around.

But, on our way home, as we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge (this all according to my mom and dad and my siblings) my brothers and sisters were gaping out the car windows all screaming "look at the boats, look at the boats,"

And I, a toddler, but not wanting to miss this spectacle, stood up and leaned on the door handle. In those days, long before silly seat belts and safety standards, the door handles move downward to open, The handle depressed, the door flew open, and out I went.

Yup, your faithful writer was ejected from the moving car on the Golden Gate Bridge at a speed my dad estimated to be fifty miles an hour.

As I've noted, I have no memory of any of this, probably just as well, but Pops glanced in panic in his rearview mirror and saw me bouncing and rolling down the road.

For once, there were no cars behind ours. Fate? Luck? Who knows, but dad's slammed the car into reverse, screeched back to me, clutched me back in the car and raced to the Presidio, which in those ancient days was a military base right past the toll gates on the SF side of the bridge.

The military doctor at on duty examined me. All the skin had been scraped from around my head as I rolled and bounced along the asphalt. (no doubt screaming in panic the whole time, but no memory of that either), and despite abrasions, contusions, scrapes and scratches, I was unharmed.

I could have perished. Concussion, been run over by trailing cars, which almost always, even back then, were thick on the bridge. But, no, I lived. Was unharmed.

OF course, babies are amazingly flexible and elastic at that age. Bones and even the skull are soft, pliable, and can take a lot of abuse, Natures protection against mommies dropping them and the like.

Not sure nature planned on the flying kid on the bridge when those adjustments were added to the design, but glad for it nonetheless.

Those surface injuries quickly healed and I went on, into childhood, my teen years, young adult hood, and so forth, and here I am.

Why? No telling. So I could be to write my book? To interact with all the people I have met along the way? I have no idea. To the best of my knowledge I have contributed no miraculous cures for disease, nor in my scribbling changed the direction of human endeavor. So, why did I survive and in the decades since so many, perhaps many more deserving souls than I, perish in the myriad ways of existence? Not a clue.

I think about it on occasion and discuss the vagaries of existence, the what if's and why of our lives. But so far  the light bulb has stayed off. As it has for wiser minds than mine.

There is a little back country philosophy in the novel on this subject, which I will let you discover for yourself when you read the piece for yourself.

Laying here typing, I will admit, that I am very happy to be here this morning. That i awoke this morning and get to be here for this day, whatever it might bring.

C. Philip.