Nibble, Lick, Suck, and Feast

Last May, Simon & Schuster published a book I put together called Found—a collection of notes, letters, and photos that folks around the country had found and sent in to me, little scraps that give a glimpse into the lives of strangers. I bought a van on eBay and hit the road with my younger ­brother for an 8-month, 50-state, 136-city tour. The publicity team at S&S managed to get me booked on local morning TV shows in most of these cities. I’d show up at the station around 6:30 a.m., a producer would clip a little microphone on me, and somewhere between weather and sports, I’d sit with one of the morning-show anchors and share my favorite Found notes for two to three minutes.

Early on in the tour, I took these gigs pretty seriously. After all, the pub­licists and TV stations were ­clearly doing me a huge favor by trying to help spread word about the book. But by the third week of the trip, I was starting to wonder who exactly, if anyone, was watching the local news at 7 a.m. Blurbs in the alt-weeklies or quick spots on the local public-radio ­stations seemed to generate ten times the response. Also, while a couple of the hosts of these shows were really cool and genuinely excited about the book, most of them didn’t get the whole idea behind it—but this only increased their chipperness and jaunty dawn enthusiasm. “Those pants are so fun!” they’d say, looking me up and down. “Plaid pants! You’re fun, huh?”

What kept me excited about these morning TV shows was ­getting to meet and hang out with the other folks who were my fellow guests. These were local chefs with recipes-of-the-week, mayoral candidates, a team of Irish dancers, a kid with an eighty-pound pumpkin. In Baltimore, on FOX-5’s Good Morning Baltimore, the anchor asked me to stay on her couch while she brought on the next guest—Baltimore’s Best Mom. This was right before Mother’s Day. Baltimore’s Best Mom turned out to be an eighty-seven-year-old wo­man named Darnelda Cole. She sat next to me on the couch, and on the far side of her sat her fifty-year-old son, Dice. Darnelda had no idea why she’d been asked to come on TV; they’d plotted this as a surprise. The anchor asked Dice Cole to read the letter he’d written nominating his mother for the prize. Darnelda grew weepy. At last, the anchor declared Darnelda Baltimore’s Best Mom, produced an oversized plaque from somewhere, and presented it to her, at which point Darnelda fell sobbing into my arms; I gave her a wild bear hug, caught up in the...