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Dear Reader,
I'm on vacation this week. My husband and I are wandering around the Blue Ridge Mountains. If you see us, be sure to say hello. Some of my friends have graciously offered to fill in for me while I'm gone. Today's column is written by my good friend Bill Duncan. Feel free to drop Bill a note.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
www.DearReader.com
Today's Guest Columnist Bill Duncan....
Let's have an understanding right away. I suffer from Biblioholism, a literary addiction that I wager every reader of this column also suffers from, or is in a state of denial. I am a newspaper editor, columnist and book reviewer, all a natural adjunct to my Biblioholism.
I have a columnist friend, Suzanne Beecher, who writes a daily column from her base in Sarasota, Fla. I admire that because facing a blank screen once a week, as I do for my own column, is a frightening task. To do it daily is heroic.
She writes my kind of column. Nothing serious, but always entertaining because each column is a slice of life. I first met Suzanne when I interviewed her online for a newspaper story about the book clubs. We became instant friends, exchanging personal e-mails almost on a daily basis.
In the spring this year, my wife, also a writer and I made a pilgrimage to Sarasota to visit Suzanne and her husband, Bob. It was the first time we had met face to face. For all you Suzanne fans, she is real, folks. Everything you read about her in her columns is absolute Suzanne. She is not from a cookie cutter mold. In my opinion, the master chef threw away the mold as soon as Suzanne was out of the oven.
Suzanne was thinking about taking us out to some fancy restaurant in Sarasota, but decided it would be more fun to fix lunch at her home. Being from the South, I was imagining something more along the line of hog jowls and black-eyed peas.
To my surprise, she fixed an elegant lunch of Chinese cuisine, down to her homemade hot-and-sour soup. I don't know how she knew Chinese was one of my favorite foods, perhaps I had written a column about it and since we exchange columns--and column ideas--she may have picked up on it from that source. I was not only impressed with the full Chinese dinner, but even more so with her hot-and-sour soup. It was authentic down to the dried black fungus.
She served the soup in fine china bowls with matching delicate china spoons. However, what really startled me was when I opened my fortune cookie and found this message inside: "You achieve great peace of mind when you talk with an old friend."
I don't know how the anonymous fortune teller knew about our strange friendship, but here I was with Suzanne and I had great peace of mind with a friend--not an old friend, mind you. Suzanne is a young friend, younger than my oldest daughter. We are a generation apart, yet we both feel comfortable in our shared cyberspace, telephone calls and letter exchanges. The common denominator is books.
In 1991, Tom Raabe wrote a book about my addiction in which he said Biblioholism is "the habitual longing to purchase, read, store, admire and consume books in excess."
Well, that sums me up. I think it sums up Suzanne, too.
Thanks for reading with Suzanne. She will be back soon.
Bill Duncan
semperfi@douglasfast.net
P.O. Box 812
Roseburg, OR 97470
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