There are times in this life when something you are doing blissfully runs headlong into non-something you are doing. For me, it just as easily happens that I am in the middle of good times—my wife and I seeing good friends; enjoying good wine, fine food, and great conversation; and a book arrives with special needs and a tight schedule—as that a particularly fertile period of work is punctuated by life.

The latter has just occurred.

Last year I produced a bumper crop of books. Books that I really felt reflected the great care I and everyone else involved took in making them. This extended into 2007. I began the year finishing a World War II history layout project that had begun at the end of the previous year. This was quickly followed by another in the same series. Next I did page design and layout on one of the best-illustrated, nicest children’s stories I know of. After that I began a third World War II history.

Then, in the space of two days, life issued its wake-up call. A circular saw’s blade shattered, and a piece of it entered my older stepson’s face just under the cheekbone, where it pushed its way up towards his right eye. Luckily, the cheekbone stopped it. The next day, a Saturday, I stupidly took a serious misstep that resulted in a fall. I was transported to a hospital emergency room in an ambulance. I thought I had broken my leg and a rib or two. X-rays, thankfully, proved negative.

I got around to scheduling a follow-up just a week or so ago. At this follow-up the orthopedist directed me to begin physical therapy as quickly as possible and to schedule an MRI of the knee.

The MRI took place Monday. My first rehab session was to have been yesterday, Tuesday, at 6:00 PM. At about 3:00 PM, the orthopedist called. I was out. He told my wife that I was to immediately schedule an appointment for the first thing today: by his schedule, at noon. And cancel the physical therapy. I had a hairline fracture of the tibia plateau.

In fact, I have five hairline, but significant—the orthopedist’s word—fractures. I broke my leg in five places! Despite some purists insisting, “It’s fractured, not broken.”

So I find myself housebound for two weeks, till the next follow-up. I’m wearing a brace from my ankle to the top of my thigh most of the day and hobbling around on crutches. I hope to all that is good, powerful, and holy that I will get an okay to drive, walk with a cane instead of crutches in two weeks, and otherwise start to feel normal again.

Good news came today. A layout project—you guessed it, a World War II history—begins next week. And the third quarter’s schedule is starting to form. I always regard work as a blessing. I mean, it is wonderful to pay bills on time and have some extra to finance good times. But it will be great to have a book to help make while my fractures mend.

I said to my wife just a while ago, “Well, as long as we’re doing things we’ve never done before, how about for our next trick one of us sticks our head into a lion’s mouth?”