The Universe Winked...Again
Notes from my first author event—at my own library
I’ve spent a lot of hours in the Park Ridge Public Library that had nothing to do with being a writer. Hauling boxes. Sorting donations. Calling out prices over the rustle of paper bags and the low murmur of people who understand the quiet magic of a used book. The sales are one of my favorite weekends of the year. They’re also the reason I know most of the people I know in this town.
On Thursday night, I stood at the front of a room in that same building and talked about a book that not only is literally in the library, but also has the library in it.
I didn’t fully appreciate the strangeness of that until I was standing there.
Many of my fellow Friends of the Library came out. That mattered more than I expected. These are people who know me as the guy who shows up early and stays late, the one who talks too much between checkout lines. They came to hear me be something else for an hour. When you’re newly out in the world with a book, there can be a particular kind of terror in being seen by people who already know you—and a particular kind of grace when they show up anyway.
Several people came who I’d never met. I want to talk about one of them in a minute.
I read three essays.
I opened with “The Meet Cute,” because you can’t understand anything else in the book without first understanding Ken—the dark wavy hair, the smile that could power the city grid, the Carol Burnett earlobe tug that turned a crowded bar into an improv scene. If I’m going to ask a room to sit with a death, I owe them the life first.
Then I read “Vampires Have Been Here,” because grief is not only devastating. It’s also absurd. It’s Ambien and cabernet and a text message you don’t remember sending, and a friend kind enough to humor you about your metaphysical defenses being low. People expect a grief memoir to be one long held breath. I’d rather hand them somewhere to exhale.
And I closed with the title essay, “The Luck We Carry,” because it happened there. In that very building, at one of our book sales, with a woman I’d offered to help carry her bags to the car. She told me she’d had three heart attacks, diabetes, and cancer, and she couldn’t understand why some people are so lucky. She wasn’t complaining. She was just noticing. I’ve thought about her ever since—and look for her at every sale.
Reading that essay aloud, in the building where it happened, to a room that includes the people who run the sale where I met her—I don’t have a better word for it than circular. In the book, there’s an essay called “And Then the Universe Winked,” about my stepping out of my comfort zone and into a world of books…and friends. Thursday felt like the sequel.
But here’s the part I’ll actually keep.
After I finished, a woman I didn’t know came up to buy a book. She started telling me about her wife, who had died. They’d been together forty years.
She got emotional. I’m not going to write down what she said, because it was hers, not mine. What I’ll say is this: she stood in a small line in a suburban library on a Thursday night and told a stranger about the person she loved for four decades, and the stranger’s only job was to stand there and receive it.
That was the whole event. Everything else was logistics.
This is what I mean when I say grief doesn’t want to be fixed—it wants to be witnessed. Forty years of a life together doesn’t need advice or a framework or five tidy stages. It needs someone to hold still long enough to hear it. That’s not a small thing to offer. Most days it’s the only thing worth offering.
These conversations are why I wrote the book. Not the reviews, not the sales, not the little thrill of seeing your own name on a spine. This. A person deciding you’re safe enough to say her name out loud to.
Someone asked me afterward how I felt.
The honest answer is that I felt the same thing walking in as I did walking out: excited that I got to share a little of Ken’s spark with a room full of people. That’s it. No transformation, no arc, no lesson learned between the parking lot and the podium. Just the steady, slightly disbelieving joy of getting to introduce him to strangers.
He would have loved every second of Thursday night. He would have had opinions about the lighting. He would have worked the room better than I did. And somewhere around the second martini afterward, he would have said something that made me laugh so hard I forgot to be nervous.
He wasn’t there. He was everywhere.
Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.
Or follow here on Substack…