Shifting Gears

To work phone magic with the production crew compositing my book, I have to use up some precious author-interaction credit (limited by company policy). This is where their understandable budget/schedule constraints clash with my responsibilities to photographers, agencies, distributors who have supplied photos. Understandable, because the outsource crew has to prepare prepress materials for 54 other books at the same time. But just a bit of voice-to-voice interactive (long overdue) cuts through the fog of a dozen emails; a ruler and a specking wheel squash a dispute over the aspect ratio of a photograph; finally, the facts on the page dissolve dissent. Sort of in gratitude, I learn some Adobe electronic editing acrobatics to save them time entering corrections.

SATURDAY
Mottled clouds over Mott Street. Facing each other at the café's adjacent window tables, the foursome resume their tete a tete or cross talk, pick up the threads from the previous week. The first November chill brings out warm weather winter plans to swoop down on relatives in the Caribbean. A gaunt dark-eyed thirtyish Italian approaches Rachel on the bench, her back to the street, and shakes her hand. "Cadaques," he reminds her by way of introduction. "Oh yes." Cadaques, once a small fishing village perched on a rocky promontory on the Basque coast, beyond Figueroa and Barcelona, is Rachel's second home and a place in common for all the others. Because the Hotel Port Lligat, next to Salvador Dali's studio, was an early discovery of my mother's and a summer childhood haunt, Cadaques has become a conversational beachhead.