Karen Spears Zacharias @ Much Ado About Books, conclusion

In which Karen, having done some local events in Jacksonville, gets down to the conferencing portion of the festival, where she gets to talk about her memoir, Hero Mama...

Remember the three must dos of life? You must live. You must die. And in-between you must pay taxes.

Well, all y'all authors out there ought to add Jacksonville's Much Ado About Books to your list of must dos. I've attended a slew of book conferences over the years; very few of which have offered the level of professionalism and hospitality I discovered at Much Ado. The entire Jacksonville crew gets a hearty round of Yee-Haws from me.

On Saturday, authors were bused from the hotel lobby to the Prime Osborn Convention Center at 8 a.m. (Prime is really a man's name, not a grade of beef). Once at the center, we were paraded past easel boards featuring our book covers, a very heady experience to see poster-sized covers of The Schooling of Claybird Catts by Janis Owen or Gullah Cooking the Daufuskie Way by Sallie Ann Robinson, or my personal favorite cover, The Greyhound God by Keith Lee Morris.

Once our egos were fully stroked, our gracious hosts then guided us to the VIP room where they fueled us with steaming java and iced pastries before herding us off to various panel presentations. I was paired on the first panel with the refreshingly candid Geralyn Lucas, author of Why I Wore Lipstick (to My Mastectomy). Our topic? Courage.

I must admit to being a bit flustered when I learned our moderator was a full-fledged head doctor, a psychotherapist. I figured if he'd read any part of Hero Mama, he was ready to make a case study of me. Geralyn, however, seemed to be totally unruffled.

Her full lips were painted a dark cherry red. Her raven hair cascaded around her neck. Her left breast teasingly played peek-a-boob in her v-neck blouse. She did not look like a woman who'd ever had a bad hair day, much less a woman who'd lost her hair due to chemotherapy. When asked about the courage she'd mustered up to deal with the breast cancer that had stricken her at such a young age, Geralyn confessed, " I feel like a total fraud up here."

She went on to explain that she borrowed courage from women she admired. The audience of about 80 laughed when Geralyn said she'd forced herself to go to a support group, not because she found it helpful, but because she'd read a study that said women who belonged to support groups lived an average of six months longer. It was the old carnival sleight of hand trick: If fate doesn't know which half-shell I'm hiding under, maybe it won't pick me.

When asked about my own mother's trials, I explained that Mama had taught me that courage isn't the absence of fear but the ability to press on in spite of it. Getting up every single day and tending to grieving children, when all you feel like doing is pulling the covers up over your head, is an act of bravery. Sometimes all you have the energy for is putting one step in front of another. But sometimes that may be effort enough.

The audience gave us a standing ovation. Geralyn told me later she went back to the VIP room and wept.

Despite our previous resolve to not blubber through our stories on C-SPAN, Mirta (Finding Mañana) Ojito and I ended up crying at my next panel with S.V. Date, author of Quiet Passion, a biography of Florida senator (and former presidential candidate) Bob Graham. It was all moderator Pat Yack's fault; the tears started when Yack asked Mirta about her father. She said she couldn't speak of him because after having listened to my story of losing my father, it was too difficult. When she told the story of the Vietnam veteran who rescued her during the boatlift, we both wept and so did many in the audience. Date refused to turn on the waterworks. He said someone had to be the man in the event. Mirta told him she thought he should've cried as a display of solidarity.

Afterwards one of the cameramen approached me and said he'd been a Marine in Vietnam. We shared a few sacred moments.

And later, back at the Book Mark table where Mirta and I were autographing books, a young woman approached me. She had a blond-haired toddler in tow.

"My husband was killed in Afghanistan," she said. "I was pregnant with my son at the time."

Looking at the boy, and his beautiful mother, I saw the loneliness and fear that had been my daily companion after my father's death.

"I can't fix it for you," I said. "But I understand and I am trying to help others understand your loss."

I don't even think S.V. Date would have been able to retain his stoic manhood in that moment. I don't know what my lipstick looked like, but my mascara was completely smudged by the time I arrived at table 53 for the luncheon with featured keynote speaker Pat Conroy. I forked my way through the chicken salad sandwich and was disappointed to find that the dessert that I mistook for cheesecake was pound cake.

Conroy told funny, familiar stories. Familiar to me because I've read all of his stuff and because our paths continue to intersect. He spoke of his mama, the family's first fiction-writer. And his brother-in-law, the one who loves the Confederate Flag and Dixie and God, but hates liberals and change of any sort. He spoke of Julian Bach, his agent, and how the garden club ladies in Beaufort got together and typed up his first manuscript on sheets of personalized stationery or yellow legal pad. He praised the work of Janis Owens, calling her one of the finest novelists of our time. And he poked fun at John Peyton, Jacksonville's mayor, who looks ever so much like Ron Howard when he had hair and still needed Clearasil. (More impressive than the Mayor's boyish good looks, though, is his campaign to entice all four-year olds into a reading program. Thus far, the city has 8,000 children participating and there are only 11,000 four-year olds in the city.)

Saturday night found us milling about the spacious and graceful home of one of Jacksonville's most accomplished residents, while caterers served us fried oysters and grouper and wine. From the dock we could see the Jacksonville skyline. At night the John T. Alsop bridge lights up a fluorescent purple. It looks magical. Like something out of a storybook. The sort of book a child of any age might love.