Good people

Author and bookseller Ann Patchett has a nice Almanac quote on her birthday, in reply to critics who call her Pollyanna:  "I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people."  Good for her. The jerks get too much attention.

Ann's first published novel came after several rejections, a bad case of writer's block, and a stint waiting tables at T.G.I. Friday's in Nashville. "Everybody believed that they were special, that they weren't really a waiter, that they were the one who was getting out. ... I had to come to terms with the fact that I was just like everybody else, a girl with a dream and a plate of hot fajitas. You get out not so much because you're special but because you've got enough steel in your soul to crawl up."

Her biblio-perseverance reminds me of my reaction at the multiplex the other night, watching Matthew McConaughey in "Interstellar" trying literally to reach his daughter through the bookcase. I've been trying to do that my entire adult life. Nice metaphor. Great medium. Good people.