Sometimes you go into an evening with high expectations and end up with disappointment. Sometimes you go into an evening with no expectations and end up amazingly gratified. Last night was one of the latter nights. My daughter bought us tickets for an evening with Neil Gaiman at Jones Hall in Houston. We’d all read and loved Neil’s books. But we had no idea what to expect if we spent an evening with the author.

What we got was a dance with the English language, a festival of words, stories well told, read aloud. We got the stories from in between the lines, we got the background, we got the scope, we got the insights, and when it was all said and done, two hours later, we were happy and joyful and grateful for the opportunity we’d just taken to sit with Neil and listen to him talk and read. We all knew we’d do it again, too, if given the chance, and I also suspect each of us will now go back to our respective home libraries and pull down his books and start reading them again and maybe even buy new ones to fill in the voids.

Last night dovetails nicely with my newly restored vision because it appears words on a page will once again be a source of pleasure to me rather than a source of pain and eyestrain. And I’m looking forward to the drive home this morning to think about how Neil used words and how I use words and how I might do a better job with my limited resources of pulling together my words into little phrases and sentences that bring my thoughts into focus as I try to pass along pictures of the pain and or pleasure I feel as I go about the daily business of living.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale