Connie Willis likes my shirt

We went to IKEA last week, to pick up some shelves. I was able to wrangle a new and desperately needed dresser out of the deal. You know it means love when your husband spends Valentine’s Day putting together furniture. It also works great for making dirty jokes at each other all day, like pointing out how many screws it took to get the dresser together (42), the resultant awesomeness which can be seen here:

I like how you can see my Threadless t-shirts through the glass; my shirt that says GRANOLA, and my shirt that says, HOORAY FOR SARCASM. The latter I think will now become my favorite, since Connie Willis said she liked it.

YES THAT’S RIGHT. I said Connie Willis. Connie Willis likes my shirt! I discovered this a week ago, when Greg and Jason and I took the kids and my Dad and his girlfriend Nancy to breakfast at the Portage Bay Cafe, which isn’t really part of the story, but it’s important to mention it, because they have the best breakfast in Seattle. You can quote me on that.

After brekkies (Eggs Benedict with salmon, mouth watering just thinking about it), we headed up to the University Bookstore to browse. I saw that there was a reading going on upstairs, a nice looking woman with a lovely red sweater set and neatly bobbed hair, and I said in a (thoughtful) whisper to the check-out lady at the Fiction desk, “Who is that?”

“Oh, that’s Connie Willis,” she said, nodding toward the podium. “She doesn’t come very often, it’s quite a treat.”

My eyes bugged out, I almost dropped the books I was holding, and I turned and yelled in a (thoughtless) stage whisper to Greg, who’d herded the kids into the children’s section, “BOONIE! IT’S CONNIE WILLIS! OH MY GOD! IT’S CONNIE WILLIS!”

The check-out women were laughing, but I didn’t care, because it’s Connie Willis! I ended up standing there for her entire lecture, which was all about the new book she’s written (I KNOW!), which I leaned over and snatched off a nearby table, maybe a little too enthusiastically. Apparently it’s about time travel during World War II, and she told this wonderful story about how she was in the a museum in London doing research, with her husband. She was neck-deep in note-taking, and her husband came up to her and tapped her on the shoulder and said, “I have a surprise for you!”

She shrugged him off, told him she was busy, she had to concentrate, and didn’t he remember that was why she came all this way? He persisted, and finally she followed him. It turns out that the museum had designated that particular day as one where people who had worked in the war effort got free admission. Without them realizing it, the place was filled with veterans. Willis’s husband had assembled a table for her, of long-retired ambulance drivers and nurses and volunteers, all eager to tell their story.

After she was done speaking, she took questions. Most of them were quite interesting, about how she’d done the research for her book. I didn’t ask anything because I hadn’t read the book yet, but also because the only question I could formulate was something like, “HOW DID YOU GET TO BE SO AWESOME?”, which reminds me of the time I met Jane Goodall and almost passed out. I took a primate class at our local zoo in 1992, and at the end of the class we got to meet Jane Goodall herself, who was speaking at a local college. Our class was allowed back after her talk to meet her, and my classmates all asked great questions. When it was my turn to say something, I mumbled incoherently, looked at the floor, and turned bright red. She looked at me sweetly, held out her hands for the lecture program I was holding, and signed it (everyone had been asking for her autograph). I still have that signature, and I still appreciate her kind smile.

I did much better with Connie Willis. I waited in line without turning red, and when it was my turn to say something, I confidently handed her my new hardback to sign, and said with what I hope was great appreciation, how much Doomsday Book has meant to me. She thanked me, and then caught a look at my shirt and burst out laughing. “I like your shirt!”, she said.

Thanks to Jason for taking pictures, and to Greg for kid-wrangling, and to Dad and Nancy for not minding that I sucked them first into the bookstore (well THAT they would never mind) and then kept them hostage while I listened to a personal hero of mine.