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The Pentagon's New Map > Director's CommentaryThe DedicationThe original dedication I wrote back in late September 2003. Mark was busy doing his second deep read of the full text draft, before we began the serious editing in October. So I used that time to pen the Acknowledgments, the Dedication, and to get my Endnotes in order. I just cranked out the small, quasi-poem to Vonne in a flash. I'm sure I actually thought about it for days on end, because that is often how I unconsciously massage such material in my head before it "comes to me" and then I simply write it down very quickly. My basic guideline was that I wanted three statements using the noun-worth-verb(ing) construction that mirrored the "future worth creating" mantra I used throughout the text. Vonne truly represents all those things to me, so I was very happy to say it 100,000 times in print. I added the dedication to my Dad much later. I was visiting Arizona with my two eldest kids in mid-February. At that point, the text was heading to Second Pass status. Neil Nyren said Mark and I could proof the Second Pass, along with other proof-readers at Putnam, in order to catch any real mistakes left at that time—but no text changes beyond that. Neil was adamant about resisting the temptation to fiddle with the text, which at that point was type-set, meaning any additional words would have a costly ripple effect throughout the book. Well, my Dad had a heart attack just before we landed in Phoenix, and so our trip turned out to be a fairly sad one, because it marked another scary hospital stay for him, and triggered the realization on his part that he needed to pursue the heart surgery he had hoped to avoid. It was that surgery, in late March back in Madison WI, that generated the complications that eventually led to his death on 27 March. While we were in Phoenix and my Dad was in the hospital, I and my kids spent two days helping my Mom pack up their mobile-home "cabin" down there, which they subsequently put up for sale. While I was working away one afternoon, taping up boxes for mailing, Neil called me and told me the Second Pass would be FedEx'd to my house in Portsmouth the next day. At that time I asked if I could offer one final change (other than the 41 typos I caught in the Second Pass galleys). It would be a small one, but a good one, I said. At first Neil said absolutely no to the change I wanted to make in one sentence in the Conclusion, saying it just wasn't profound enough to warrant the cost. He was right. It was a very minute point. So I backed off. Then I asked on impulse (meaning absolutely no forethought): "Can I offer an additional dedication?" Neil thought about it for a minute and said yes, because there we were talking about open space below the rather short dedication to Vonne. So I gave him the verbiage about my Dad, replicating the noun-worth-verb(ing) construction. That was my last act of creativity on the book. When I got the first hard-cover final production version from Neil in a FedEx just before I left for Washington DC on Putnam's Premeditated Media Tour in late March, I scanned the image of the Dedication and immediately emailed it to all my family members. This was about a week after my Dad's heart surgery. He died the day after the mini-tour concluded. I felt terrible because I wanted him to see the dedication ("To John / A life worth emulating"), and I figured it hadn't happened in those final hours. Later, when I gave a hard copy to my Mom just before the funeral, she told me she had printed out the file I had emailed her and taken it with her to Madison when she returned on the day before Dad died (she had gone back home to prepare for his expected transfer to our hometown hospital). She said she had showed it to Dad and that it had meant a lot to him. That news was only one of many reasons why delivering that eulogy later that morning was the hardest performance I have ever had to give. But that gives you a sense of how important a Dedication page can be to an author. |
Putnam, 2004 |
