At the age of fifty-nine, I have fallen in love again. And very recently I have been diagnosed with a mental impairment that suggests I may never be able to live comfortably with the man I have fallen in love with. This is due to a serious learning disability that is characterized in part by a deficiency in relationship skills.

I am one of those people who have the kind of unseen, invisible disability that creates havoc in the lives of those who have it and equal havoc in the lives of those to whom they are close. Mine has been a lifetime of gaucheries and embarrassments to myself and others. I upset people. I know I do. I upset myself. Yet I do not mean to do this. I am as innocent of malice as any other natural disaster.

Also at the age of fifty-nine, I have started a small publishing house. I had always expected that by this age I would have lost much of my driven energy and retired with my cats to my cottage on the marsh, but this is not the case. In India, where I have lived for short periods of time, I could have begun to decline by now quite gracefully. What is there in our culture that drives us so dementedly on? At any rate, my small venture may be doomed to fail, as my brain's disability encompasses the impaired mathematical relationships which impede any adequate understanding of an overview of assets and liabilities, printer's estimates, advertising costs, invoices and purchase orders, and all the other numerical information necessary to the proper running of a business.

An impaired sense of spacial relationship impedes my ability to parallel park a car as well, but as I have moved from New York City's shopping challenges to the haphazard parking arrangements of the plazas and malls of shoreline Connecticut, this aspect of my learning disability is of little consequence compared to falling in love and starting a business.

And so, with little overt intention--I had, as I say, every intention of living alone in my cottage on the salt marsh and continuing to write a book a year as usual for my agent to sell--I have somehow colluded with circumstances to start life all over again and entered in the two Olympic events for which I have the least aptitude: a close relationship and a business.

I had wanted to live simply and to write a new group of novels about the romantic adventures of women, and in fact I had done so. After a lifetime of being published regularly, however, there had recently been a bad patch. And the past six or seven years of painful rejections by other publishing houses have been at least partially mitigated by seeing my name on the jackets of books published by my own house. This is not self-publishing in the old sense. Bick Publishing House (named in honor of my orthopedic-surgeon father from whose driven brain my own driven brain has sprung) has been honored by inclusion in the listings, databases, and microfiches of wholesalers and distributors who only play with real publishers. Meaning that I publish authors other than myself, that their books are never author-subsidized, that I publish at least three books a year, that I maintain some sort of demand by adequate advertising and promotion, and so forth.

Not in waterfall volume, but in the relentless drip-drip of an aberrant leak on a small rock, my small books come forth into the world. It is gratifying to watch the purchase orders come in, and to see that the books ship out. And while the accounts receivable statements at the end of the month announce sales by the hundreds and not the hundred thousands, there are surprisingly few returns. We are the smallest of the small of the new breed of independent publishers, myself and the small band of loyal and gifted friends without whose talents and willingness to work for a pittance or nothing at all, there would not have been a Bick Publishing House. But our books, about animal and human rehabilitation, about the smallest of the small and about people with disabilities, continue to be wanted and ordered.

I once possessed the staunch ability of a heavy-weight fighter to bear the gut-wrenching agony of my agent's occasional return of a book that she could not sell. But after she returned six years' worth of the longer, more seriously literary novels, thrillers, spy stories, and love stories, set in the countries of the East where I often travel, my belly folded.

I was, and still am, used to selling books. More than fifty of my books have been published, and I have been edited by the mighty and published by giants: Atheneum, Doubleday, Golden Press, Dutton, Dodd Mead, Prentice-Hall. True, one was a piece of adult soft pornography when orthodontist bills appeared in the name of my young son. But the rest of my books were for mid-aged children and young adults. Not all were equally good. Some didn't come out at all the way I wanted them to come out. But several, I am happy to say, were good enough to have earned literary awards--the ALA Notable Book List, the Christopher Medal, the Herald Tribune Honor Book, a few more local prizes for fiction and nonfiction. There were futuristic, visionary novels, novels of rage about the fouling of the human nest, picture books, psychology books, adventure books, philosophical books, dozens and dozens of books.

There were, it turns out, reasons for the torrent of words, this frantic need to verbally organize the chaos of living, this need to write or die of meaninglessness and boredom, reasons I've only recently discovered.

On the one hand, I am gifted.

On the other, I am disabled.

On several continents, through several marriages, into the ears of audience, agent and editors, four husbands, two children, close and distant friends, and as many strangers as I could entrap or enchant into listening, I have poured my endless commentaries on living.

I have no choice.

Words are all I have to organize the world I live in. Words are about the only way I have to give and receive communication in a definitive way. Without words, I can pick out pieces, but I cannot connect them. An affectionate goodwill and a temporary abeyance of personal positions is what I substitute for the comprehension of another person's reality or the mood of a group of people.

I can analyze later from my collection of acutely observed details, but I can do nothing about reading the subtleties of nonverbal facial expressions, body language, mood colorings, on the spot. In short, the whole picture, the greater gestalt, is beyond me until it is too late. The feeling I have had all my life has been like driving through traffic without being able to understand the traffic lights. The accident is upon you. It is always too late to avoid collision. The trouble, of course, is that I only understand what has happened two days or two weeks or two years too late.

And so, words are my passion, and my disability.

There is the recent diagnosis from yet another in a long line of psychiatrists and psychologists to prove it.

There is my inability, if I am conscious, not to talk, write, or if neither is possible, to hum words, silently or aloud, to myself, to prove it.

There are all those books, and now, with my agent's inability sell my newest novels for the past few years and my inability to tolerate this, my setting up a publishing house to continue to produce and sell as many words as possible, to prove it.

There is my daughter, director of developmental disabilities programs and a specialist in the traumatized brain, to prove it.

There is my son with the run-on mouth like my own, to prove it.

And there is Himself, the man with whom, at the age of fifty-nine (a side effect of this disability is a kind of eternal youth), I have fallen in love.

When he has had enough of my endless, if mellifluous, singularly monolithic way of communicating, he smiles, puts a finger to his curving Irish mouth, and beckons me. He is a one-time half-back. I am small. He is a romantic lover. Between size and talent, he has ways of quieting me down.

When he came courting me, this big man with the football player's huge, powerful physique and shaven head, familiar to me in our small town as a warmly pleasant and intelligent man, middle-aged but still some fifteen years younger than I, when he came surprisingly to court me one afternoon over a quiet cup of tea, he made it perfectly clear it was not my books or my past sophistications but my energy, my passion for everything that had enticed him. And what bonfires I had not realized I still possessed he raised in me, forgotten coals into conflagrations. Chemistry in full, flower.

And so, my entry into the Olympics.