I feel both jazzed and embarrassed to share a rather private wish. Now you’re chuckling. Her? Embarrassed? She blurts stuff I’d never dream of revealing except to my most trusted friends.

And here it is. As I stated, announced with equal parts excitement and shyness.

I’m trying to turn this here blog into a book. There I’ve said it. Now it’s back under the covers for me. See, I’m even hiding from myself. I guess I’m not such a natural showboater.

But I may come by the tendency to “strut my stuff” naturally. My dad, who lived to be 96, was a sort of Renaissance man in that he dipped his (paint)brush in several artistic realms.

First came the music. Most nights after dinner, our home was filled with the sound of my dad at the piano, warbling away, with my sisters and me occasionally joining in. He favored the tunes of Broadway of the forties and fifties, with “My Fair Lady” a particular favorite. I recently bumped into an old family friend who told me that her parents, close friends of my parents, had been big party-givers, and that my dad could always be counted on at these soirées to provide entertainment at the piano. I’d had no idea about this but wasn’t surprised; he loved an audience.

He also composed music in the Broadway style of the time, which he hoped would catapult him to fame and fortune. Sadly, his entreaties to Gene Kelly and others failed to bear fruit. Still, he kept on writing his songs, with his musical aspirations eventually supplanted by his newfound love, painting.

Ever confident, he joined a couple of local art clubs, and held a number of exhibitions, with “opening” events no less. I don’t believe he ever sold a work of art to anyone not a friend or relative. Nevertheless, he persisted.

The final artistic modality was his poetry, which was occasionally featured in the local Jewish press but for which he held loftier goals.

The fact is, he never gave up on his dreams of a wide audience for all his work, whether created on piano keys, or with paints or words. And he seemed impervious to self-doubt. I remember a conversation in which I shared my struggles with a novel I was working on and he said something like “but you know it’s good, right?” In fact, I knew no such thing, and I shared my misgivings with him, to his total bewilderment. How could one not believe wholeheartedly in oneself, his thinking ran.

So he never achieved the recognition he’d been pursuing for much of his life. But I believe that the pleasure he found in the act of creating nourished him profoundly. His creativity and his dreams – even if misguided – kept him alive and engaged all 96 of his years.

Now, in the family tradition, I too am pursuing a wider audience for my work. The notion of giving life to a new form for my content came from several readers – and they’re not even my relatives! and I’m convinced of the blog-to-book as the most promising form. Think Julie and Julia, a blog whose author, Julie Powell. vowed to cook every last recipe in Julia Child’s seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Julie’s blog became a book, and then Hollywood came a-calling (my blog emphatically does not lend itself to film).

I’ve begun pitching literary agents with the concept of a book version of the blog, a work about aging seen through the prism of Parkinson’s, which could just as easily be another illness. By the time we reach the age when our kids take away the car keys, we’ve all got some health issue or other.

If you are a literary agent, or have any connections in the publishing industry, please do get in touch. Oh and by the way, kindly do not suggest self-publication. Been there done that and once was enough.

And if you’ve been considering trying your hand at some new artistic endeavor, I say go for it! It doesn’t even have to be good. It just has to be yours.

Please do check out my podcast, Parky Conversations. It’s fascinating!