Tuesday, March 20, 2007

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

Jackie is a mother of three, a wife, a house wife and a manager of a convenience store so technically she is also a cook, chauffer, dog walker and probably about 100 other occupations that could be listed here. She has always been the kind of person to never complain. She is always the lady who would do anything to help some one out but never accept help herself. All around Jackie is probably one of the sweetest most loving people in the world.
All of the things listed above are all things that Jackie loves to do but there is one thing in the whole world that she loves more than anything. That is her writing. She has only ever written one thing in her life and that one thing is a very detailed diary of her life for the last 20 years. The day her oldest boy was born was the day she started writing. After that first day she has never missed a day of writing. Some of the entries are long and some are quite short but never the less they are all very detailed.
As you can very well imagine 20 years worth of diary entries turns out to be a lot of paper. There are only a few people in the world that knows about her diary. One being her husband, two being her kids and thirdly her best friend. Out side that tiny little circle absolutely no one knows about these papers. Now Jackie has never considered her self a writer nor has she ever had the ambition to even think about writing anything other than her diary. One thing you do have to remember is that these entries are very detailed. She can go back to any entry in the diary and remember exactly what she did that day and because it’s so detailed whenever she reads these old entries it feels like she’s right back on that day. Another thing is that these pages are full of happy thoughts, sad thoughts, trials, tribulations and just about every emotion that can be experienced.
Well one day Loretta, Jackie’s best friend was over visiting. They were having a few drinks and reading some of the entries in the diaries. They were laughing, crying and then laughing again. Through out the night Loretta asked Jackie if she would ever consider writing a book about her life. Jackie just laughed at the idea. In no way did she ever think she had a life that was interesting enough to write a book about. That was pretty much the end of the story. It wasn’t brought up again.
About 6 months later Jackie was again having one of her normally busy days when her cell phone rang. The voice on the other end introduced himself as a member of a huge publishing company out of New York. He then explained to her that her friend Loretta had submitted some work to him on Jackie’s behalf about six months prior. He explained to Jackie that he had some interest in possibly making a book out of it and invited her and her husband to New York all expenses paid to discuss a possible book deal. Jackie hung up the phone ten minutes later with an appointment to see this gentleman in a week.
A week later Jackie and her husband landed in New York and were quickly met and picked up in a limousine and taken to the publishing agency. Once inside all the formalities took about 15 minutes and then a man named Blake got down to business and started talking book deal. Jackie couldn’t believe the numbers that were coming out of this guy’s mouth. Potentially at the end of the day Jackie and her husband could walk out of the agency with a check for half a million dollars and if the book went as well as the publisher thought it would then Jackie would make at least three million more dollars in royalties.
Jackie and her husband couldn’t believe what was happening. After all these years of struggling they would be able to not have to worry about anything ever again. So about 4 hours later Jackie and her husband walked out of the agency with check in hand and a signed contract to let the publishing company go ahead and use her diary to write a book. All this time. 20 years she never realized she was writing her family’s future but she was ecstatic that it turned out that way. The day turned out to be better than perfect. However there still was one thing she needed to do and that was get back to the hotel and put today’s entry into her diary.

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