Past, present, and future

I'm on a new path. Can't get my drivers license until someone takes me to Stow to get a judge to release the warrant on my old license, same social security number, that has been on there for 16+ years. Even if I had changed and gotten a Colorado license, the warrant would have remained because I have the same social security number. Go figure.

My sister, Carol, Bessie the bullfrog as my grandfather nicknamed her, 'promised' to take me, but like all of her promises (visiting me, bringing me the dresser The Idiot (Jimmy) gave me, etc.) it was and is empty. I'm still waiting here in the senior community where I currently reside and among whose residents I am comfortably living--without that ride to Stow. An old boyfriend, Yogi, cannot get away from his current roommate because she is convinced he will leave her for me. Too bad she ignored my invitation to meet and claimed I was an unspoken wish (on Yogi's mind, but not on mine) to  leave her for me. I like Yogi, always have, but I will never live with him for the same reason I broke  up with him over 20 years ago -- he spread my personal business around to anyone who was with him. In essence, he put my business on the street and I was NOT down with that. I'll put it out there, but you cannot put it out there without my consent and without my knowledge. Not so strange come to that.

Carol claims I am on the outs with my remaining relatives (her, Tracy, and Jimmy) because of my mouth. She mentions nothing about using her mouth on me -- I told her about her double standard and that did not go down well with her as she continued to castigate me for my mouth and my choices.

I will admit I am sorry that Jimmy's "London girl" is dead. Dropped dead at the restaurant when she was with him and Carol (?) the day after Xmas in London. Jimmy doesn't think I'm sorry or grieved enough to suit him. Well, I knew she was a fake and a liar and said so openly. I guess you would say that was injudicious of me, but I wanted him to know Jess was a liar and would not move to the US to marry him. He told her not to lie to him any more. Oops! She lied to him about being a young, unmarried, tall leggy blonde without children when they met online. She was short, pudgy, and a Filipino who was married to a British citizen -- an earl in fact -- and had three children. Jimmy knew none of this. When he found out he forgave her and told her not to lie to him ever again. Ooops! She never mentioned that her husband was still alive and was dying of cancer when she had taken up with him. I'd say that was a big lie. She also lied about family Visa and getting it renewed so she couldn't come to the US to marry him, not to mention her husband was still alive. She could and did afford to renew the family Visa when her husband finally died, buy she neglected to mention that to Jimmy. So much for his forgiveness or her promise not to lie any more.

She remained in the UK and continued to lie to Jimmy. She blamed her mother for cautioning her not to mention her children or her marriage and I told her she needed to come clean. She did and that is where we were when Jimmy used his hard earned money to visit her once -- and sometimes twice -- a year. She had changed her tune and was 'stuck in Visa hell' again, but this time with her moving to the US and trouble with her change in status with the US INS. That was another lie, but Jimmy kept hoping they would be married and she would move to the US.

Hope is a big part of the con's game -- and Jess's game -- with Jimmy and the rest of the family. They believed that she would soon be here. In the meantime, Jimmy spent every year in the UK with Jess (and her family). Carol and Tracy believed Jess was being truthful and not lying any more. Jess might have been a good person, but she was a liar up to the end of her life when she dropped dead in the restaurant in London the day after Xmas.

Yes, I know you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead but I believe in telling the truth -- even if it hurts. Yes, I know that's why Jimmy doesn't believe I'm sorry for Jess dying -- and in such a memorable manner, but I am sorry she's dead. I wouldn't wish ill on her. I would've wished she had lived long enough to tell Jimmy she continued to lie and I knew it all the time. That won't happen, so I remain unforgiven and out of Jimmy's good graces. Oh, well. Them's the breaks.

He forgave someone he didn't know and had never met, but he won't forgive me because I clued him in. Maybe it's true that I should keep my mouth shut. It would make it easier on my friends (at least when they're telling lies and hedging their bets), but I have not changed. I've always been this way -- even when Mom was alive and calling me a liar. Jimmy, Carol, and Tracy have always known about me, but their Christian charity doesn't stretch to me. Oh, well.

I know Carol makes empty promises and I don't call her out on that. It's just one facet of her personality and I deal with it. My siblings obviously cannot deal with the honest fact that I am honest -- about everything. Hence, they will not forgive me. Oh well. Back to my life.

I continue to wait on Carol to bring me the dresser she promised me two, three months ago and going to Stow. I'll eventually get someone, probably Crystal, to take me to Stow to get the judge to release the warrant imposed on me 16+ years ago and get my drivers license by taking the exam at last. Carol insists I must get my drivers license back but that would require that she -- or someone else -- take me to Stow.

Well, since Crystal, Tien (her little boy), and Bang (her husband) came to visit me today, I will get to go to Stow with Crystal. Carol will claim I'm using Crystal, but Crystal visited me and when she asked if Carol had taken me to Stow, I told her no. Crystal will make time for me to go to Stow. I've told her it's a 3-hour drive, but Crystal has the time and I will go with her. That is the end of that -- finally.

I've also enrolled in college and will get my degree in graphic arts. I might even sneak in a course in literature and maybe take a double major. It's all grant funded and I will get what scholarships and grants that will fund my education to minimize the college debt. I think I can get a few grants and maybe a scholarship or two come to that. Yes, I am not taking my 'retirement' lying down.

I also want to work and I've called around. I have discovered I have more than medical transcription to offer in the end. I have insurance, secretarial skills, and so much more. I'll trot them out and use them to get back to work. I'm going to go to college part time and can afford to work. It will help when it comes time to pay off my college loans -- less if I can get more grants and a scholarship or three. (I know. Wishful thinking. If you don't wish then you don't get. I'm wishing but I'm also relying on my background and skills and that's not shabby at all.)

I've also decided that my artistic skills are not so shabby either. I do have the talent and I will practice my skills until I am as good (or better) than I once was. I realized that I didn't get to my previous level without all the years and hours of practice and I can do that again (practice I mean). I might even find out that my skill and talent haven't deserted me at all. I have the bonus of years of life and the wisdom and skills that come with long life. Not too shabby at all.

So, yes, I am what I have always been and I've added to the bottom line, just not the old bottom line with Yogi. He lied to me before and I'm not my brother. I won't forget that Yogi lied and put my business on the street, but I will forgive him and not forget the past, but use the past judiciously. I will ask no promise and I have already told him we are not going to pick up where we left off, except where our friendship is concerned. I will not repeat the past and I have learned from the past. He will not leave his current relationship (20+ years), especially not for me. His girlfriend must understand that -- even if she sees things a different way. Her actions do not inform my decisions. I am and have always been the same person. She would do well to remember that my relationship with Yogi is as a friend -- and ONLY a friend.

That is all. Go about your day and keep that in mind as well.

I have taken a break, but have not changed. My siblings should keep that in mind as well. I am as I have always been.

EDIT: Because of my very recent discussion with my sister, Carol, I have agreed to never mention her or her children, Jimmy or Jess, or Tracy and her relationships. Nothing I have said is untrue, but my family is intent on censoring me, so in view of my recent promise to my siblings, I am correcting my usual modus operendi and will not discuss my siblings or people associated with my siblings. Sorry, but I will bow to the pressure and allow myself to be censored.

Also, according to Carol, Jimmy's fiancee Jess died 2 days after Xmas and not the day after Xmas. My mistake. I got that wrong because I either misheard the date or was not told the date. Mea culpa. Mea culpa.

I will censor myself by not talking about my siblings or my dealings with them from this date on. I prefer not to be censored, but Carol views my writings as being hurtful to her and the rest of my family. If you want the unvarnished version, you will have to come visit and read my journals. I will allow that -- if you visit..

Crazy High

I came across this recipe for a cake-pan cake which became popular during the Depression because it needed no eggs and no milk, both of which were rationed at that time, and now would be called a vegan cake. My mother, and all my old aunts, great aunts, and cousins, called it a Crazy Cake. Crazy because there was no dairy or eggs included.

Mom's cake had a thick fudgy icing and was dark as a chocolate cake could be. She made it all the time in a big old-fashioned 9 x 13 metal pan with curved handles that stuck out both ends. Mom couldn't cook for beans, but she could bake like the devil -- mostly because she preferred dessert to everything else. Her baked beans were a toss-up between watery/soupy and the bacon half done on top or burnt to a crisp. Her scalloped corn dish was the same, half done or very well done (at least the crunchy buttered cracker topping was crisp). You can't go far wrong with creamed corn since it's cooked ahead of time anyway. I will have to say that she did do potato and macaroni salads well with lots of chopped sweet pickles and a hefty dose of celery seed in addition to the celery already in the bowl, but there wasn't much cooking to do since my sisters and I cooked the macaroni and potatoes for her. It was our job, a job that I ended up doing most of the time.

This cake, however, was right every time.

When I saw the recipe on King Arthur Flour yesterday I knew at once it was Mom's (and the whole May family's) Crazy Cake. I didn't have the recipe for the fudgy icing, but I have other chocolate icings I know how to make.

Late last night, I decided I was going to make the recipe, opting for mixing the ingredients in a bowl instead of in the pan which the recipe calls for. I sprayed the pan with my favorite preparation, poured in the mixed ingredients, and 35 minutes later had a much lighter colored chocolate cake. It smelled delicious. I used natural cocoa instead of the Dutch Process cocoa called for, but it was still delicious even without the icing. Moist, tender, and reminded me of my childhood. The good parts, which usually involved food.

Next time I will use my dark black cocoa, or Dutch process, since I have them both and I may try the boiled cider vinegar since plain white vinegar is what I used last night. I don't know if it will make a difference, but I will find out. I don't think I'll add frosting and just eat the rest of the cake naked. It is still dense, fudgy, and good. I may even make another tonight -- or even this evening. Anything is possible.

Sometimes I need a trip down memory lane on my stomach, evincing the good times full of laughter and family and food like at our family reunions -- the ones we went to every year and spent with my mother's vast clan. I got to see my cousins the last Sunday before school started and there was always watermelon and crisp fried chicken and desserts that filled a table. There were also dishes of things I'd never tasted before and running around with the cousins as a child and meandering as a teenager since we were too mature to run around slipping frogs and bugs down each others' backs and whooping like Indians on the warpath, even if we went to Logan Elm where Chief Logan gave his famous speech and stopped a war between the local tribes and the settlers.

The tree was filled with concrete, a shell of history around a core of stable concrete to keep the illusion of Logan's Elm alive, but it was familiar and the gathering place of the family tribes. It's still a favorite memory.

One of the old aunts dressed in her Depression Era finery (old women shoes, thick stockings, and flower print dresses that hung nearly to their ankles) smelling of lavender water and talcum powder gave the recipe to Mom who was in transports of joy when she tasted the fudgy cake and thick frosting. Chocolate was always her favorite drug, and chocolate cake with thick fudge icing was beyond heavenly. Whatever the occasion, whether a homecoming at church or a pot luck dinner with family, Mom always made her Crazy Cake and we feasted on chocolate until even the crumbs and streaks of icing were gone from the pan, all of us in a transports of joy akin to love from chocolate-fueled pacifying brain chemicals. Nothing ever seemed so horrible that the Crazy Cake would not cure -- at least until the chocolate high wore off and it was time to refuel -- as long as there was cake and icing left to scrape from the pan.

The rest of my chocolate high is in the kitchen and I think it's time to refuel.

That is all. Disperse.

Summer Memories

I didn't get much work done yesterday, not with the bloody nose and  the roofers making all kinds of noise. I did better this morning since I  slept in and they finished up their work and went their way without  waking me up. Tells me just how tired I was from yesterday's sturm und drang. Last night was a little better.

During  all the hullabaloo I talked to my Uncle Bob and to Beanie, who was busy  wrangling her fiance's kids going somewhere. Beanie got the beads I  sent for her Xmas ornament pattern I sent her weeks ago and Uncle Bob  wanted to tell me he got the letter I sent him in January about family  stories for a history of our family for my boys and their families. He  kept forgetting to mention it when he'd talked to me every other time he  called to let me know he got my letter.

Families are like that,  focused on their own families and letting the satellites of their  extended family get lost in the noise and busy-ness of everyday life.  It's all right. I'd forgotten I wrote everyone and he is the only one,  after 9 months, that has responded at all; and I wrote a lot of letters  asking for family anecdotes and histories. At least he called. That's a  point in his favor, but then Uncle Bob is -- and has always been -- my  favorite uncle. My next favorite uncle would've been Uncle Homer, who  was really a great uncle and Grandpa May's younger brother. That's a  story for another time.

I got a call from my cousin Ellen last night and we chatted. She finally finished reading Among Women,  which is a big thing because Ellen doesn't read much. She does read my  letters and has read almost everything I've had published, but not my  books . . . until now. She has a Kindle and really loves reading on  that, which is a good thing. Even better, she loved the book and asked  when the sequel is going to be published. I'm getting to it and will  have it done, along with 2 other books, soon. I don't have a specific  date since work and preparations for the holidays has taken a big bite  out of my free time.

Ellen had a surprise for me. Aunt Lois, her  mother and Uncle Bob's wife (it works out like that) gave Ellen a file  full of papers she had kept from Ellen's younger years. She went through  the bible school papers and old grade cards (oh, the horror!) and found  an old program from one of our beauty pageants. It was the year she was  Miss Iraq and wore the costume I designed and made for her.

Every  year, Hoity-Toity and I went to spend a month up at Uncle Bob's place  in the country and every year we put together a beauty pageant. It was  better than playing school with Cutty as teacher, believe me.  (The  nicknames were the way Uncle Bob, and Grandpa May, his father, thought  of us.) Cutty was just so bossy. Okay, it was Cutty's idea to have a  beauty pageant, and the year Hoggy's (that's Ellen) program indicated is  the first year we had the pageant in the 2-car garage Uncle Bob built.  We took it over, curtaining off areas for dressing rooms and a stage,  and did it right. It was a far cry from the cobbled together pageant we  had the first year when I was runner-up.

All during the month of  our sojourn in the country, we searched the nearby local dump for glass  bottles and jars (and the thickets for berries) to clean up and use as  prizes. It was a very big deal. Mom and Aunt Lois got into the spirit of  the thing and bought cocktail dresses and formals from Goodwill and  gave them to us for our pageant. I took one of the dresses, a bright  golden cocktail dress with yards of skirt, and made what I thought would  indicate an Iraqi national costume -- an I Dream of Jeannie kind  of harem costume. I was 9 or 10, so give me a break. Hoggy had long  honey gold blonde hair and I fixed her hair up into a high ponytail,  complete with a golden mini crown to hold her hair. Some of the dress  went to make a little bra and vest and the rest to make her sheer  bloused harem pants. Uncle Bob put his foot down when I was trying to  figure out a way to put a big jewel in Hoggy's navel. She won best  national costume that year, and I won Miss Universe.

Neighbor  girls, friends of my cousins, got into the act and some even had their  costumes and formals made for them while we cobbled together our own or  wore dresses from Goodwill. It was a very big deal that got bigger every  year until we stopped having the pageants. I suppose we stopped because  we were teenagers and didn't spend that month in the country any more.

Btw,  Hoggy is Ellen's nickname, which is short for Roadhog, and Cutty is one  of Laura's nicknames; the other is Gassy, for obvious reasons. Uncle  Bob nicknamed everyone. I was Pearl; Beanie was Dick Tracy or Dick; Mike  was Pickle; Aunt Lois was Hatchet Face; Bobbi Jean was Leaky or Black  (we called her the S. S. Leakybottom); Gayle was Shepherd; and I can't  remember if he gave Hoity-Toity and The Mushroom nicknames, but you can  see I've carried on the tradition.

Listening to Ellen read off  the names and events was a trip back to those times. Images of those  summers swam through my mind and reminded me how much fun we all had. We  had little spats and did the things cousins always did (like deviling  each other), but mostly they were golden days and star-filled nights  when we rarely watched television or sat still for more than a few  minutes unless we were making something for our pageants. To see us now,  you would never know we had been so close. I miss those days and that  feeling of family.

Uncle Bob asked me if I would eventually buy a  home up here and if I would ever move back to Ohio. I might buy a home,  but it will be here. I love the mountains. Even though I love my  family, some more than others, I doubt I could find a way to fit in with  them again, not like the way we were those summers as we busily put  together our pageants and scoured dumps and berry bushes. Some things  cannot be recreated. At least we have the memories, and there are a lot  of those, but I wonder what people would make of our homemade pageants  and the way we threw ourselves into the preparations. I guess it doesn't  matter, but I still wonder.

Faded Photographs

Whether it's fantasy or reality, memories transport us to the past, to moments of pleasure and pain, to times when we were important or diminished, to what lies beneath. The quality of memory is often strained.

Mom sent me an old photograph of my father in his Army uniform when he was young and healthy, when he was alive. I decided to make copies and send them to my brother and sisters when I realized my grandchildren know nothing about Dad or Mom or even me, come to that. My children were partially raised by another woman, my ex-husband's second wife, and she is not a fan of me or my family. She did her best to eradicate us from my boys' memories and what remained was painted in vivid venom. This is what my grandchildren have learned as those tainted memories are passed down. To my grandchildren I am the faceless entity who sends them birthday and Xmas gifts. I exist to give them presents.

I had printed off copies of Dad's picture, took three of them, and inscribed the back with who he was and when the picture was taken. Dad was in his 30s and he looked handsome and smiling. He always smiled in pictures and in life, seldom frowning or getting angry -- unless someone got in between him and the television program or movie he was watching. He was full of laughter and great stories, but how would his great grandchildren ever know? I had to tell them, and I began by sending the pictures to my youngest son's three children.

My oldest son's twins are not yet 2 years old, so their picture will have to wait. Not a problem. I have the photo stored on my computer and online so I can download and print more copies, next time with the name brand photo stock that goes with my 4-in-1 printer.

Eddie, the middle child, has two boys I've never met and have had no contact with. He was the one most affected by his stepmother's tales of terror and it will take time to get an address for him when I reach out with my Xmas gift for 2012.

I've decided to put together a family history of my side of the family: the good, the bad, and the ugly, but only the truth. There are some stellar types in the family and some less than stellar types, but they all deserve their moment on the page. I've contacted both sides of my family asking for photos and letters and histories, if they want to write them. I will add news clippings of births, marriages, and deaths and notable happenings, like the cousin who was governor of Texas and in the car with JFK when he was shot in Dallas that November day in 1963. The old letters I've saved from family who have died and gone on, leaving a legacy of remembrance and colored bits of their life, will go into the books (there has to be one for each family), as will the family reunions and DVDs and CDs with home movies converted to digital format.

I started with the idea of photos and histories, but there is so much material that I'll likely have a few volumes, one each Xmas, for each of the families. I may even convert it all to digital and print so those who don't know that Mom's dad was the sheriff, mayor, and biggest business owner in Alger, Ohio can read about how he captured John Dillinger and took him to the Lima jail where his buddies busted him out and killed the sheriff, or how one of my father's in-laws ran with Dillinger around Dayton and Cincinnati before he went to Alger to see his stepmother and was caught.

There were alcoholics and family locked in institutions. Some were rich and some were poor. There were farmers and business men and ordinary people and a beloved aunt who was married to the Omar Bread man. Name changes and secrets, a skeleton here or there, but a truthful and accurate picture of all my family, including the abject poverty in which my father grew up in Cynthiana, Ohio. Dad's letters to me about growing up and his life in a rural wide spot in the road will be copied and placed in the book, even the part about how backward he was and that his father delivered him in the field when his mother went into labor while bringing lunch to Grandpa Cornwell when he was plowing. The fights with local boys and the jokes and risque stories and the jewel bright moments and my father's funny stories, stories no one could tell the way he could; they will all be in there. Cousins, family reunions, feuds, dreams, madness, and life in all its facets is my gift to my grandchildren.

My memories and the remembrances of as many people as I can beg, cajole, threaten, and interest in contributing is my gift, but it is a true gift and one I hope they will treasure as much as I treasure them.

In this world where few people stay close to their families and still live within a 20-mile radius of home, memory is even more important. It may be the only way to keep in touch with one's roots and the legacy of family. My solution is one way of bringing the past to life, but I'm a writer and words and pictures are my touchstone with life and memory. I live a half a continent away from my family but they are never far from my thoughts or my heart. I want my grandchildren to share a bit of what makes them who they are and to feel all their roots, my side of their roots, too.

The Gift of Time

There have been many memorable gifts, like the easel, brush, canvas board and oil paints and the Shirley Temple doll with teeth locked in her characteristic smile, but I would have to say the year my brother turned the tables on me gift wise was the most memorable, even more so than the year my brand new husband bought me a black turtleneck collar and gave it to me wrapped in a big balloon filled with air and shiny mauve tinsel. He got it Christmas Eve just before the stores closed.

I usually manage to give gifts I am sure the recipient will love and I give the gifts with flair, like the year I gave my sister-in-law nothing lavishly wrapped in succeedingly smaller boxes. My brother took a page from my notebook and gave me a gift I still treasure -- paper. It wasn't as simple as that. There's more to the story.

Christmas Eve is the traditional big family gift exchange in our family. Everyone gathers at Mom and Dad's house with their kids, contributions to the feast and the bags of gifts. I usually attend alone since I'm single and my children are grown with their own families and do not live in Ohio (neither do I now).

One Christmas Eve about twelve years ago, I sensed something in the air and it wasn't the surprise I had planned for my father. It was something someone else had arranged and I could feel the tension, everyone's eyes on me. I tried to catch them staring, but everyone pointedly ignored me when I looked at them and much giggling ensued. Something was definitely up. I sat quietly watching everyone open their gifts and the children ooh-ing and aah-ing and squealing with delight as they opened the hills of wrapped packages in front of them. I got a gift from my parents, something my mother picked out and which i have now blocked out to retain my sanity and holiday spirit. It was usually something gaudy, something I would never buy for myself or even look longingly at in the catalogs that constant bombard me in the mail all year long.

When the tension was taut enough to walk across the room three feet above the carpeting, someone cracked. I think it was one of my brother's kids, probably Alisha since she has the secret keeping ability of a true tattletale. "Daaaaaad!" she wailed. "Now. Do it now!"

My brother and his wife locked eyes. His wife Bobbie shrugged her shoulders and Jimmy got up and walked into the dining room, appearing with a large and very heavy box and a mischievous gleam in his eyes. Something was definitely up and I was about to get it.

Jimmy drew my name at Thanksgiving and I, wanting to avoid more gaudy and horrid gifts, gave him a list of things I would like and need. To anyone but me, they didn't seem festive or Christmas gift-like enough, but they were what I wanted--and needed. With any luck, the box he hefted toward me and dumped with an ominous thud at my feet would not contain an anvil or yet another exercise machine I would put together, use for thirty minutes and then ignore until it was home to dusty cobwebs and dried out insect carcasses. I crossed my fingers and opened the box, careful not to jiggle or otherwise set off the holiday bomb I was certain waited inside.

With a sigh of relief, I uncovered a large box of paper just right for my computer. I said thank you and waited for everyone else to continue opening their gift while I mulled the logistics of getting the box from the trunk of my car and into my house without a hernia or worse.

"Go on. Open it," J.C. urged. I never noticed that his eyes gleamed with the same mischievous light that my brother's often held.

"I did. I love it. I was almost out of paper."

"No, open the box."

Oh, no. It is something gaudy and horrible. I'll just leave it in the garage and shove it in a corner. "All right. All right."

I lifted the lid and pulled back the tissue paper. Tissue paper? This is getting interesting. There was a piece of paper written with a calligraphic font and underneath were stacks and stacks of money. Fives, tens, twenties, and... oh, yes, it is . . .FIFTIES. Each neat bundle was wrapped with a banking band stating the amount of each. I was afraid to look any further. My brother wasn't rich, so he had to have robbed a bank and shared it with me. Bless his pale, hairy hide.

I picked up a stack and fanned through them, turning sideways so as not to ignite the flames of lust that surely burned in each and every one of my family members' greedy hearts. That's when I caught on. Each bundle was fronted by a Xeroxed copy of a bill and beneath were blank pieces of paper cut to size. I quickly checked the other stacks and they were the same. Not only that, they were only two stacks of bills deep. Beneath was the paper I needed and had put on my list.

"Read the note."

Since I can't afford to give you money, here's a box full of paper to make your own. I've started it for you.

I laughed until I cried. Jimmy's kids talked over each other, explaining how their dad had gone to the bank for the wrappers, used his new color printer to copy the bills and measured and cut each stack to perfection. He wouldn't allow anyone to help and he went through a few reams of his own paper to get the stacks and the Xeroxed bills just right. He had even pulled the magnetic strips from some of his own money to sandwich between the copied bills so they would seem real. It was a labor of love and time that I will never forget.

The stacks of bills are safely hidden in a locked metal box along with the note and the reams of paper became stories and novels long ago. The memory, however, remains fresh and bright and I bring it out every Christmas Eve to hang on my memory tree.

Sunshine, rain and memories

As I topped the rise on I-24 coming home from seeing my dying father in Ohio, it was in the closing days of winter three years ago. Below me in the valley at the foot of Pikes Peak, the sun shone and gilded everything below the hoary-headed mountain glittering like a diamond studded ermine beneath the clear sky with that color of blue peculiar to Colorado. The sun ruled alone, no clouds to attend it or cover its face and the air rushing through the open car window was fresh and clean. I was home. At 11:45 a.m. as I topped the rise and drove down the other side, that's what I thought: I'm home.

I didn't know until I walked into my apartment, unloaded the car and sank gratefully onto the couch how much things would change in the next few minutes. All I knew was that I was grateful to be back in my stuffy apartment with the blinds and curtains closed.

After I shut and locked the door, opened the curtains and blinds and raised the windows, and after the fresh crisp air rushed into the room, I called my mother to let her know I had arrived safely. It had been a rough trip, longer than I had anticipated, with part of the journey spent sick in bed with a bad cold. It seems every time I leave Colorado I return with either a bad cold or some new strain of flu, and this last trip was no different. I spent a few days with friends in Missouri and spent almost all of them in bed. That was all behind me and I was home, anxious to find out if my father was still hanging on, and so I called.

I knew from the sound of my mother's voice my father was gone. It was in the trembling trill of her hello. "When did he die?" It was at 1:45 p.m, the same time I topped the rise to see the glittering valley below me and knew I was home. My father had hung on until I was safe, until he knew for certain I was home. That was three years ago on March first, but his death was the beginning of my awakening, my spring.

Spring came late three years ago, winter reluctant to relax its grip on even this sheltered valley. The skies darkened and the cleared, shedding snow and then rain like a deep cleansing breath, and then the snow came back with bitter howling winds and heavy, wet snows that stung like needles on all exposed skin. The weather mirrored my feelings of grief and relief: grief at my father's death, that anchor in my storm-tossed wanderings, and relief that his struggles and pain were finally over, that the gnawing of rabid rats on his bones was finished and he was free.

Like the uncertain spring, I was uncertain of how to get through the days of picking up the phone to call and share a joke or listen to him tell me what his roosters and chickens were up to this week. He was gone and, even though I knew the fact of it, like a phantom limb still reaching, still trying to connect with something tangible and solid, he was still there.

Winter reluctantly gave way to the soft scented warming breezes that coaxed pale greens, yellows, pinks and whites from empty branches and snow dappled ground and spring blossomed in earnest. Grass raised sere brown tendrils, testing and tasting the air, then springing to vigorous life. Tulips and crocuses popped open and ragged yellow flags of forsythia flew beneath cloudless Colorado blue skies. Life emerged slowly and the fox, having regained its color, still in its ragged winter coat trotted up the sidewalk toward its hidden den with a hapless squirrel dangling from its lean jaws.

My father died before he had a chance to see the spring, his ashes long since cold, but it was his gnarled and work roughened hands guiding mine as I wandered the aisles of Rick's Garden center, inhaling rich compost, moist earth and the overwhelming aroma of flowers and budding trees and familiar herbs. Among his favorites -- irises, lilies, lilacs, roses and bushy-starred allium -- I added rosemary, lavender, thyme and violets. The berries, vegetables and fruits would come later with the opening of the local farmer's market on Saturday mornings where I would use what my father taught me to pick and choose to make his -- and my -- favorite meals, as hungry for life as he had been and unwilling to waste a single moment.

The wheel of the year turned, the soft pastels of spring giving way to the deep greens and flashing hues of summer that would enrich and blaze with glorious fire in autumn before the stark, dark silence of charcoal smudged skies and silence of winter when the promise of life sleeps beneath the soft, cold, white blanket of winter.

My father is gone and yet not gone. Like the cycle of the seasons, some part of him lives on, a carefully planted corm or bulb entombed in the autumn that sleeps and wakens with the return of the sun and the warming breezes of spring to come back to life and stretch greening arms beneath the upright head of the pastel-shaded blossom. He returns in my thoughts and memories and I hear his laughter every time I see his ever present smile in his pictures, his fingers twisted with age and lined with earth. I know they will be warm with welcome when it is my time to join him. In the meantime, there is the promise of spring and green growing things that smell like sunshine, rain and memories waiting to be plucked.

I remember the music

Music has always been a part of my life, from my mother's classical records,my father's dance music, and the bluegrass music my grandfather played incessantly as he sat by the window in the dining room in his house smoking and tapping his foot in time. Music has been a constant in my own life, a barometer of my moods and feelings, but it was a young woman who filled the void after the boy I loved had moved to Australia with his family and my best friend and his family had moved back to the States who taught me the most and shared with me a new kind of music. Until that time, I didn't know how music could also heal a little girl's pain.

I was nine years old and my heart was broken. Andy Watson's last words to me were ones of promise and hope. "I'll find you no matter how long it takes." He was nine years old, too. His father was a civilian contractor who worked for the Army and had just been reassigned to a base in Australia. I had briefly worn a charm bracelet Andy got from his sister as a token of promise, a pre-engagement gift, so to speak. His sister took it back before they left and I was left with only Andy's words, words I clung to with the fierce and passionate strength of the young.

Our best friend, Scooter Kennon, was gone shortly after and I was alone. The neighbors who moved into the Kennons' old apartment were nothing like Scooter and his family. They were younger and had three small children, a roly-poly blonde girl with rosy lips and cheeks just two years old and twin girls, as dark as their sister was light, just six months old. The aroma of spices and the sound of Tito Fuentes was gone, replaced by gurgles and goos and wailing in the night and the biting scent of antiseptic and baby powder.

Listless and at a loss with what to do since there would be no more adventures into the jungle that surrounded our section of housing on Fort Gulick wearing machetes in leather scabbards at our waists nearly as long as we were tall, I moped around the grounds, wandering here and there along the cul-de-sac haunting places where Scooter, Andy and I played. Down on the common we chased an armadillo one winter at the Christmas tree bonfire, running after the armored beast like savages on the hunt, coordinating our attack from three sides, herding it toward the trees and into the darkness at the boundary of manicured lawns and the jungle whispering and buzzing with life. There was the guava tree we climbed to sit among its branches and pull green globes from the branches , biting through the tough skin to the sweet succulent flesh inside, juice dripping down our chins and over our fingers while our mothers called to us.

The coconut tree was full of green and ripe coconuts begging to be chopped down and cracked open, but there was no one to share it with, so I didn't bother. The flame flower bushes sparkled with dewy jeweled flowers, their nectar unsucked and the flowers untouched left for the hummingbirds. I'd wear no more flower garlands about my neck or wrist; the boys were not there to make them for me. Even a dried empty husk from a locust didn't make me smile as it was did and I wandered silent and lost in memories . . . until she saw me.

I don't remember her name. I remember her kind smile and the sounds echoing down the stairwell into the carport where I aimlessly tickled a doodlebug with a blade of grass, making him roll into a ball or burrow backward this way and that as he tried to escape the dirt arena I made to trap him.

She squatted down beside me and watched for a few moments before I noticed she was there, a gentle whisper of scent, soft and cool in the sticky summer Panamanian heat. Tears still streaked my face as I looked up and into green eyes like a still pond reflecting the sun on broad-leaved banana trees. She smiled and I couldn't help but smile back at her. That's when I noticed the music. "Is that yours?" She knew immediately what I meant and nodded. "Would you like to come up and listen?" I nodded, swiping away the dirt walls so the doodlebug could go free, and followed her.

The apartment was decorated like stories from the Arabian Nights, as though Scheherezade had just left the room and would return in a swirl of gossamer veils. She invited me to sit on the couch and offered a glass of tea. It tasted of mint and honey, but it was the music that soothed my troubled heart and echoed the anger, sadness and love I felt. "It's West Side Story." She showed me the album and explained the story, starting the record over again.

I knew the story: Romeo and Juliet in New York. Puerto Ricans and Americans fighting over turf, traditional enemies out of which came love and death. I was transfixed, my heart soaring as Tony sings about Maria, exultant when the Sharks and Jets danced and fought and filled with longing and regret when the final song filled the room with Maria's tears over Tony's death when she holds him in her arms as he takes his last breath, knowing they will never have someday or somewhere they could be free.

When the last note faded into silence, the words came, first in a halting trickle and then in a torrent, and she listened. She didn't chide me or tell me I was being silly and it was just puppy love, something that would fade with time, something I'd grow out of. She offered me a handkerchief embroidered with blue flowers, forget-me-nots, and I wiped my eyes and blew my nose and suddenly felt a little better.

Once more she got up and replaced the needle, this time on Tony singing Somewhere full of belief in love and hope. To my nine-year-old heart it was a glimmer of possibility and the beginning of a new friendship. She introduced me to many Broadway musicals and to stories like no other, stories of magic and mystery and stories of little girls lost and found.

I spent many hours in her apartment drinking tea flavored with mint and honey those last few months before we were transferred back to the States, and slowly the pain faded. The memories remain, not only of Andy Watson's promise to find me but of her kindness and what she shared with me. I've had many neighbors in the intervening years. Some have been friendly and some not so friendly, but never have I had a neighbor who shared so much. The names have faded with the years; I have traveled a lot in over forty years. I don't remember her name. All I remember are the sights, sounds, and scents of those autumn days and the music. I will always remember the music.

The Xmas That Almost Wasn't

Every year Mom says she doesn't want a gift and every year my siblings and I go together to get her a gift. Last year it was the entire Forever Knight collection and this year it was Tour of Duty. Mom called yesterday to wish me a merry Christmas and say thank you for the gift. I reminded her that she didn't want the gift and would have to give it to either Jimmy or Carol since Beanie already has the entire collection. "You'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands." So much for not wanting a gift.

The gift I got Beanie is too big and she specified medium and doesn't have any pockets. Luckily, she can exchange it. For her birthday, I'll give her a gift certificate for books. She got a Sony Pocket Reader from her husband. She's also having trouble setting it up. I tried to help but Stacy, her evil alter ego, was out today instead of Tracy, and was not very cooperative. It's all Stacy's fault that I gave her the wrong directions. She did say Randy got her a Kindle and those were the instructions I was walking her through. It wasn't until later she said it was a Sony and then didn't know which version it was. "It's silver," she said. That's helpful, Stacy, they all come in silver. It's one of those days.

I am, however, reminded of a Christmas long ago when I almost didn't get anything. It wasn't that my parents couldn't afford to buy gifts; the others got lots of presents. It all goes back to an incident that started with an offhand comment.

I love puzzles, challenges and riddles. Always have. The weeks before Christmas always provided riddles, puzzles and challenges in the form of finding the gifts and figuring out what they are. There were always a few token gifts under the tree, but they were mostly camouflage and usually contained uninteresting things like socks, underwear and clothes. The trick was finding where the good presents were hidden and I was exceptionally good at the game, which is why Mom always hid them at Grandma and Grandpa's house when we lived near them, until the year we moved into the big house on Terrace. That house had a basement with rooms and doors that locked the original owners stored canned goods and root vegetables. The bins and shelves were still intact when we moved into the house, although they didn't last long once Mom decided she wanted a family room in the basement. That's another story for another time.

Mom knew Thanksgiving day I had already begun searching for hidden gifts. "Are they at Gram's?"

"They're here." My eyes glittered with mischief and excitement. The hunt was on. "You'll never find them," she said.

"If they're in this house, I'll find them."

"You're welcome to look." Mom considered the subject closed and my curiosity squashed. Anyone who knows anything about curiosity knows that all she did was heighten my desire to prove her wrong and ensure that I would keep looking. A hidden cache of gifts was like waving catnip in front of a cat. I'd find them and unwrapped would be nice.

As the oldest of the four children, I was often tasked with babysitting when Mom and Dad worked or went out. During the week, I was the one who got everyone off to school since my parents had to be at work early. Friday evenings, I was usually the babysitter from the time I was eleven (my grandparents lived a phone call and eventually a few blocks away). Twice a month on the weekends, my parents drove up to Lockbourne (renamed Rickenbacker) AFB to the commissary for groceries and it was during those extended absences I searched for the gifts, especially since the other kids usually went with my parents and I was alone in the house.

One Saturday morning not five minutes after they piled into the car and headed off to the commissary, I began my search in earnest, starting with the basement. I seriously doubted there were any gifts hidden on the second floor since all three bedrooms were occupied by children. I started in my parents' room on the first floor and it didn't take long. They didn't have a closet; there were no closets in the downstairs. Before I headed to the basement, I briefly considered the back port utility room where my father had his beauty shop and the room on the back of the garage, but dismissed them quickly: not enough room. The gifts had to be in the basement and so to the basement I went.

The basement was a warren of rooms with a toilet stall on a raised platform behind a swinging door, a place where kissing games were played during parties, a clear space for the twin tubs and washer and dryer beneath the laundry chute that opened next to the built-in cupboard in the dining room above, and three rooms with locked doors, one of which used to hold the coal when there was a coal burning furnace in the basement. Patiently, I worried at the old fashioned locks on the doors until they opened. A few brittle looking, cobweb-shrouded jars of corn, beans and amorphous contents swimming in murky fluid were scattered about the shelves, but the room was essentially empty. The coal room was equally empty, except for a meager supply of coal for Christmas stockings. Only one room remained.

The lock was easy to open, but the block or time gnawed wood that pivoted on a nail was not quite so easy to open. There seemed to be some kind of trick to getting the simple antique low tech lock to work and yet I couldn't figure it out. It just would not budge. I didn't dare scar the wood by using a screwdriver or other tool to pry loose its wooden grip and give away the game and so I opted for brute force.

My heart thundered in my chest. I was certain the gifts were behind the door, and so I continued my assault. Little by little I managed to loosen the block of wood, inching it upward with patience wearing thin as the sun moved relentlessly across the cement floor. Suddenly it shifted, a mere sliver of wood lying between me and success, and stopped moving. Nothing would budge it from its position. I couldn't move it back into place or out of the way. In frustration, I took off my loafer and banged it with the heel of my shoe and . . . it spun around drunkenly as the door fell open.

I had imagined Fibber McGee and Molly's closet from my mother's description, but what I saw boggled the mind. An explosion of colors in all sizes and shapes lined the shelves and spilled out onto the floor in an avalanche of toys and dolls and . . .. My heart stopped. Gravel crunched in the driveway. They were home. I had exactly two minutes to get the door closed and locked and up the stairs before I was discovered.

I slammed the door and spun the wood into place and it fell away, swinging loosely in gravity's grip. It was broken. No! I held the wood in place and banged on the nail with the heel of the loafer I still held in my hand, my heart pounding, drumming, thundering so loud my ears were full of the sound. A rock clinked to the cement floor and I picked it up, wedged it in the crack of the door behind the wood bar, forcing the wood against the loosened nail until it held, locked the door and raced for the stairs, dropping to my knees and crawling across the first landing so my parents wouldn't see me in the window, crawled up the first few steps and lurched to my feet to burst through the door, running at full tilt through the dining room, kitchen, Dad's little shop and banged out the back door to leap to the ground next to the grape arbor. Without stopping, I ran beneath the grape arbor and out the other side and then shinnied up the cherry tree into my favorite spot not daring to breathe until I was safely ensconced. I panted, gasping for air, streaming with sweat, my hand against my chest over my laboring heart, ears pricked for every sound. None came. False alarm.

My skin prickled in the frigid autumn wind as the sweat cooled and my body shivered, teeth chattering. No coat. I climbed out of the tree and went back into the house, rubbing my naked arms where the hairs stood on end above the goose flesh that covered every exposed inch of skin, avoiding the basement door as though it led to plague ridden darkness full of unknown horrors waiting to pounce, because there were if I was caught.

My parents got home an hour later. Groceries were unloaded and put away and grocery sacks were folded and placed under the kitchen sink between the dish soap, cleanser and the wall. Mom watched me carefully when I got up to do the dishes after dinner without a squawk even though it was Carol's turn. She knew something was up and was no less tenacious than I when it came to ferreting out secrets and satisfying her curiosity, although her curiosity only extended to what her children were hiding. Her nose twitched, smelling something off or just slightly wrong, and she had an excellent sense of smell. She could even smell vodka under Listerine and Colgate toothpaste hours old (Dad not me -- he never did take to being a teetotaler in spite of Mom's conversion). She smelled the distinct aroma of hidden knowledge and the beginnings of fear of being caught on me, and it didn't take long to discover the source of my fear.

The tiny pebble in the hand Mom held out to me was familiar. My pulse raced as I looked straight into her eyes and said, "It's a pebble." Heat rose in waves from my blushing cheeks and my hair swung down to cover the burning tips of my ears. "Guess where I found it?"

"In your shoe?"

"Don't get smart with me, young lady. You know exactly where I found it."

I opted for smart aleck mode. "On the ground no doubt." I never saw it coming until her hand cracked against my cheek, rocking my head sideways and imprinting the red outline of her hand and fingers on my hot cheeks. I didn't expect what came next either.

"Now that you've seen what you're getting for Christmas ..." I didn't dare contradict her or explain that I hadn't actually seen the individual items, just the overwhelming presence of mass and color. "You won't need to unwrap any gifts. There won't be any for you. That's what your snooping cost you."

No Christmas. No gifts. And I knew her well enough to know she'd make me sit down and watch my brother and sisters open every single one of their gifts.

"Your gifts will go to someone else, someone whose children don't snoop."

I lived in a hell of anxiety and fear that she would make good on her threat for the next three weeks, each day an eternity marching down an endless hall into the arms of death. No Christmas. No gifts. For the first time in my life, I dreaded Christmas morning.

The night before Christmas, a night I have never been able to sleep through, the seconds crawled by on broken legs. The moon stood still above the trees and refused to move as my sisters squirmed and shifted in their sleep, mumbling incoherently. The clock on the mantelpiece in the living room echoed through the house. The room was still dark when first Tracy and then Carol woke and whispered, "Is it Christmas yet?" I pretended to sleep. They tiptoed past me and met Jimmy coming down the hall, whispered briefly and tiptoed like a herd of wildebeests down the stairs to the first landing. The click of the light in the foyer echoed like doom. "Wait until your father turns on the lights. Carol, go get Jackie." I would not be spared, not today. Carol skidded to a stop as I opened the door. Taking my time, I shuffled to the bathroom and closed the door. "Hurry up. It's Christmas." For you, but not for me, I thought.

"Go downstairs. I'll be there in a minute." I splashed cold water on my tear-stained cheeks and hoped no one would notice my red-rimmed, puffy eyes. I plodded down the stairs where once I would have raced, taking two and three stairs at a time and even sliding down the banister in bolder and less mature years. I had aged centuries over the last three weeks.

Boxes in bright primary colors festooned with ribbons and bows and glittering in the light of blinking and stolid Christmas tree lights spilled out from under the tree. Carol, Jimmy and Tracy begged me to hurry as they waited, dancing from foot to foot and jumping up and down in the foyer outside the living room. Dad stood guard with his movie camera, flood lights beaming across the room and dimmed by the glory of Santa's emptied pack while Mom sat in her chair, a queen surveying the hungry rabble. The time of punishment had come. "Jackie, you hand out the presents," she said, twisting the knife in my still beating heart. I picked up packages in either hand, swarmed by my avid siblings, working my way in toward the tree.

Gifts were grabbed from my hands before I finished the first syllable of the name. I walked down the cleared path, picking boxes and bags from both sides, holding them briefly before they were snatched from my hands. In a daze, I moved toward the tree. Mom smiled and exclaimed over each toy, book and doll held up and tossed aside while the next gift was unwrapped, admired and replaced with more and more gifts. "Get the small one," Mom ordered. I reached for a small red foil wrapped box. "Not that one, the blue one." I picked it up. Jackie. It was my name. I looked over at Mom and she nodded her head with a small self-satisfied smile.

Ignoring the whining and begging behind me, I carefully opened the package, slipping trembling fingers beneath the tape and sliding off the paper undamaged. Inside the white box in a square nest of cotton was a pair of earrings, real earrings with real amethysts. Carol crawled past me, almost knocking me over. "This one's for you. And this one." Tears swamped me as I sat down on the floor while Jimmy, Carol and Tracy piled gift after gift around me. Numb with shock, I stared dumbfounded at the growing mound of gifts until Tracy put one in my hands. My name sprawled unevenly across every blank space on the gift card in green crayon, folds and wads of tape sticking up all over the box. "It's from me," she said, crawling onto my lap. "Open it."

There were many Christmases when the presents spilled out from the tree and we had to work our way outside the room in and Christmases when there were fewer presents under the tree, but the Christmas that almost wasn't is still as clear now as it was that Christmas morning in 1967. The only gifts I remember are the easel, canvas, pastels, brushes and paints and the earrings. Nearly being excluded remains indelibly etched in memory. Did it change my yearly hunt for gifts?

No, I'm very good at hiding my tracks.

'Twas the weekend before Christmas

If you haven't seen the BBC's Merlin yet, you should. The show was a little silly and played around with the mythology of Merlin, Arthur and Camelot at the beginning, but it has definitely grown. It is no longer what one of my F-list friends called "The Once and Future Prat." Oh, Arthur is still a bit of a prat, but the show has depth and heart and Arthur is growing out of the prat stage. Consider watching it. Start at the beginning, but stay the course all the way through the second season; the finale is moving. I can hardly wait for the third season.

Yesterday wasn't a great day in many respects, but it did bring some surprises. The grocery delivery didn't happen and I wasn't happy, but I got dressed and went out to buy my own groceries and found a great tree that didn't cost a bundle. Putting it up has turned out to be a bit challenging since tree lots no longer nail bases to the trees, but I found an ingenious way to stand it up without a tree stand. Then on to the decorating while my computer burned DVDs. A package arrived, the result of a gift card spending spree and I dove into Terry Pratchett's Wintersmith only to be hauled up short by responsibility. I finally got the box of review books sent two weeks ago and put away Wintersmith in favor of Flesh and Fire, magic in wine. Once I got through the mythology part of the book (a huge takeoff on power, wine, sacrifice and blood), I had little hopes for the book getting any better, but I was wrong. I'm halfway through already and Gilman has put together a fascinating mythos and world with just enough mystery to fuel plot and imbue characters with interest. If nothing goes wrong and the writing doesn't go downhill, this has the makings of a really good trilogy.

The rest of the evening was punctuated with chores, reading, changing disks to be burned, labeling and putting burned disks into cases and watching the movies waiting to be watched . . . and, oh, avoiding temptation. That was the other good surprise yesterday -- a drive-by gifting. Someone I've not seen in ten months drove by to drop off a gift bag full of holiday joy: books. More Terry Pratchett books to be exact. Three of them. If I wasn't so interested in Flesh and Fire, I doubt I would have been able to put the books away after reading the first few pages.

Hint to drive-by gifter: some kind of camouflage is essential to keep the gifted from looking in the bag and being so excited they couldn't wait for the big day. Good thing my big day is tomorrow at the solstice or I'd be in agonies of guilt (not).

Tomorrow is also my nephew Cody's 19th birthday and I can hardly wait to call and wish him a good one right before I chide him for not getting busy and getting his driver's license.

On the solstice, the longest night and shortest day of the year, at dusk, I will finish opening the rest of my gifts while the rest of you wait for the jolly white-bearded man in the red and white suit Friday (or Thursday night if you're the anxious type). On that occasion, I shall listen to carols and follow Dickens' Scrooge (Alistair Sim) through his annual peregrination to discover the meaning of Xmas while drinking a cup of egg nog, nibbling gingerbread and cookies and listen for sleigh bells in the snow. Nearly fifty years ago, I stood on a stage in a borrowed, pinned together navy skirt and a brand new white blouse reciting A visit from St. Nicholas with several other children in the first and second grades, a poem that is forever engraved in the folds and whorls of my brain, not only because it was one of my first memories, but because my mother had me recite it every time we visited family, no matter what I wore. It didn't seem so surprising to me that I could remember the entire poem by heart because I worked to memorize it for the first Xmas play I was in. She didn't have me sing the Hallelujah Chorus or recite the words from all the plays I have been in, which is a mercy because that's a lot of plays and concerts. I remember bits of dialogue and it doesn't take long for me to get up to speed on the words in all those plays, as long as you don't expect me to remember all the articles, stories, books and poems I've written as well. And I didn't have to perform all the dances I learned either, another blessing.

At any rate, I still remember the poem and I still feel the excitement I felt as a child on Christmas Eve when I couldn't sleep and the night stretched to an infinite distance when the sun would never rise, hence forcing me and my sisters and brother to wake my parents long before dawn. We didn't understand the sun wasn't going to be up until eight. We only understood that we couldn't wait any longer sitting at the top landing peering through the banister rails in the shadowed darkness trying to figure out if Santa had visited and left the space under the tree full of presents or if our bulging stockings, which we couldn't see, were full of sticks and lumps of coal as our parents had cautioned. I was always the instigator on these forays, although I didn't have to work hard to wake my siblings, not even Jimmy who slept like a hibernating bear full of Valium and vodka, and I led them to the stairs, keeping them as quiet as possible while I with my sharp eyes inured to the darkness counted shadowy lumps bulging from beneath the tree and holding them back as long as possible before going down to wake our parents and ask if it was Xmas yet. Aah, the memories that populate the silent nights as the big day draws near. How clear they are.

May all your days be bright and all your Christmases be white. Happy Holidays and season's greetings.

And so it begins

I've been busy lately adjusting to a new work schedule and having some difficulty with it, but tonight's events put things into perspective.

I had my first radio interview at Blog Talk Radio with Gayle Johnson and Miriam Mimi Jacobs. The ladies were wonderful and had actually read Past Imperfect so that was good. The best part is that they both loved the book. I'll see if I can get a copy of the podcast and post it. Beanie and Ants surprised me by calling in to the show and saying hello. I heard Ants in the background say, "I love you." Beanie said how proud of me she and the boys are. That was definitely worth hearing in such a public way.

The other event this evening was a pre-interview with Toni Quest of Screaming Woman over the phone. We had a lovely conversation and found a lot in common, including our ages. TQ told me she doesn't usually read the books of authors she's interviewing, but after talking to me she had to read the book before Monday. I sent her a PDF review copy and I look forward to the interview on Monday night at 8:30 p.m. EST. I may even get used to all these interviews and chats my publicist, Linda Barnett-Johnson has set up for me between now and April 2010. At least I get to talk about my favorite subject -- writing. You thought I was going to say me. Ha! Fooled you!

Adjusting to a new earlier work schedule and working out the kinks has had me on the ropes, but the holiday has saved me. I love this time of year from Halloween right through to New Year's and Valentine's Day. It's not for the candy or the romance or the gifts, although I do enjoy that part, but because of the way it always makes me feel: happy, joyful and as excited as a kid trying to sleep Xmas Eve. The scents and sounds of the holiday get under my skin and make me feel like singing, but the best part is baking candy and cakes and cookies to give out and hearing how my gifts are received. One person, who shall remain nameless for now, opened her gift ahead of time, but I forgive her. It didn't arrive with the gift I got for her son and new daughter-in-law, so it's not really her fault. I also sent out holiday e-cards to everyone on my list and those were well received. Even if the gift is nothing more than an e-card, I always live in the expectation of shining a momentary brightness into the receiver's world so they hopefully feel what I feel -- happy to be alive and thankful for another year of friends, family and dreams coming true. That's something else I got from tonight's interview, that feeling of possibility and the knowledge that I am living my dream by writing and seeing my books published. Even though I can't live completely off the proceeds, it's coming and coming soon.

If you take away nothing else from this rambling post, take this: The holidays are a time of joy and happiness, a celebration of another year lived and a the brightness of love and possibility at a time when the earth is at its farthest from the sun. As we swing away from that bright glowing ball of gases and light and solar winds, it's temporary. After the 21st of December, midwinter day with the shortest day and the longest night, we swing back toward the sun and warmth and another year of possibilities and dreams waiting to be realized and lived. Out of the darkness, we come into the light. That is the promise of this time of year. Inside those dead looking trees, is life asleep and waiting to be awakened, and so it begins again.

If you do nothing else, be grateful for every season and enjoy it to the fullest. Don't waste it because although the season will come around again, it won't be the same one as last year or next year. Each one is unique and wonderful on its own. Celebrate your dreams and your families and friends, but most of all celebrate yourselves. This day will never come again. Make it a special memory.

For me, I'll be baking cookies and cakes and candies and finding people who need a little sweetness in their lives to enjoy them. After all, everything goes down a little easier with a sprinkle of sugar -- the natural kind of course.

Watching for cars

It's one of those golden mornings when the sun comes up and lights up a clear Colorado blue sky and I wish I was higher up in the mountains where the air is clear and I'm not snotting and sneezing all the time. I don't have nearly as many problems with allergens when I'm higher up and away from all the pollution and citified air. In order to get back there, I have to spend more time working down here, but I'll get there.

I had an interesting chat with someone I've known most of my life and had a crush on when I was younger: Scott Haney. His mother and mine were best friends and we both grew up thinking we were cousins, so the combination of shyness and familial taboo kept us both from saying that we liked each other. Finding out he had a crush on me was a surprise, but a pleasant one. Of the three Haney boys, he was my favorite. Paul, Jr, the oldest, was too focused on himself and Johnny, the youngest, was too goofy. Scott in the middle was not only the tallest but the best in my eyes.

Scott asked me if I remembered a time when he went out and laid down in the street to prove to me he was strong and brave by letting a car drive over him. I do remember and I remember being amazed and scared. I also thought he was incredibly stupid, if brave. He didn't live on a busy street so he didn't get his wish, but the gesture was enough--for me.

Scott and his wife Annie have been married for thirty years and they seem very well suited to each other and happy, which makes me happy. He got off to a rocky start and he's having a lot of physical problems now, due to his rock start, but he deserves to be happy and I'm glad that he is.

That's one thing I've noticed. Even when I've been interested in someone or had a crush, when I find out that they found the right partner and are happy and content with their life, it gives me hope for the future and that I'll find the right partner and happiness of my own. Until then, I am content to be closer than ever to my dreams coming true and being able to write makes everything so much better. I can see the change and evolution of my own writing as I let more and more of myself out into the open. There are still a few things I keep close to the vest, but fewer than before. It's a difficult process and one that is filled with challenges for me because I learned a long time ago to guard my heart to minimize the damage caused by others. I've found I'm not unique in this and several other people in my family do the same thing.

It's hard to put myself out there and trust people--or specifically one person--when I keep end up getting hurt and my emotions and heart trampled. People who only care enough to share their news and their troubles but never ask about mine remind me how much I still need to keep aloof and not allow myself to be someone else's emotional battery, boosting them when they are feeling ignored and dismissed in their own families.

Just because no one listens to you at home is no reason to run to me for an emotional boost because I care, especially if it means the only time you do show up is when you want something and never think to ask how I'm doing or how I'm feeling. It's selfish and uncaring and completely egocentric. That makes you the same as the people who marginalize, ignore and dismiss you. It's like a virus you keep passing around. It's sad and it makes me want to disconnect from all communication because I can only give so much without getting a little something back.

That's the thing about relationships. They work best when there are two people involved, like Scott and Annie. Scott had several surgeries on his back and is completely disabled, so Annie went back to school to get a nursing degree so she could pick up the slack. Scott designs and builds long bows and recurves, but he mostly stays at home and handles things there because he cannot work. He told me he and Annie get up together in the morning and when she leaves for work he goes back to bed for a while before getting up and taking care of things around the house and with his own projects. They are a team. When he was sidelined, she took point. That's the kind of relationship everyone should have instead of a relationship where one person carries all the weight and the other coasts and whines when they don't get everything they think they should have, and end up berating and blaming the other person for not working harder or doing more or giving up more so they aren't put out.

Relationships should be a two-way street, like the relationships I have with critique partners and friends. I give. They give. We all benefit and the relationships grow stronger. It's like a plant. Without water, sun and nourishment, the plant dies. Too much of any one element, or too little, and the plant cannot survive. Sometimes the plant needs more sun, a shuffling of nutrients and less water, but you adjust and give the plant what it needs to flourish. It's all about paying attention and being aware of what's needed -- like being ready to pull someone you care about out of the street when a car is coming.

Strangely enough, Scott was ready to get up and out of the way if a car did come, but it was the gesture that counted, and I was impressed eve though I did think he was a little bit stupid.

Bouquets of yellow cactus flowers

First, I'd like to say 'thank you' to all the military veterans who have kept our country and most of the world safe, often giving their lives. My father was a veteran as were many of my relatives. One cousin even survived the Bataan Death March during World War II. On this day of all days, I honor and thank you.

Today is my oldest son's birthday. He's 36 today. Happy birthday, David Scott. Tom 's son, whose 11th birthday is today, happy birthday to you, too.

Today is also my best friend Chili Bob's birthday. He got his card, but I'd like to add a Happy Birthday and thank you for being you wish for his 62nd anniversary on this planet. Chili Bob is an amazing man and it turns out we are related distantly by Princess Nopee who was an Algonquin and lived during the days of Puritans coming to this country. Chili Bob is also related to the Bourbons, the family that ruled France right up to the end when King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were beheaded. Their children survived, as did many of the rest of the family, and Chili Bob is a direct descendant. Since he and I are distantly related that makes me related to the kings of France. Pretty cool when you get right down to it.

One more item up on the calendar today is my interview with Lisa Haselton. It has gone live and is waiting to be read.

This is a morning of contrasts. I'm sitting here eating fresh organic strawberries that taste better than any I've had in a long time, simply delicious, and I'm looking at a gift for my aunt. She loves to garden and has a beautiful back yard garden in which she says she cannot place a single flower or plant, so I'm looking at flowering plants to send her for the holidays and I find Christmas cacti and it takes me back to a Christmas cactus my father loved.

That Christmas cactus had beautiful yellow flowers and he was very proud of it. My middle son Eddie was about two years old and he was entranced by the flowers, drawn to them, and he stared at them for minutes at a time, which is amazing when you consider his age. One afternoon all the beautiful yellow flowers disappeared from the cactus and reappeared in a dirty little hand held out to me to make me smile. Dad wasn't amused and he never let me forget that my son destroyed his cactus. Eddie was devastated and cried his broken little heart out. He wanted to give the pretty flowers to his mom. To him, they were flowers like the daisies and clover he often picked for me.  He didn't know they might not grow back.  They were the only flowers he could find. Snow covered the ground outside and no green poked up through the icy and dirty frozen crust. He wanted flowers to brighten my morning so it made sense to pick the flowers from the cactus. It made sense to him. Dad's house was a jungle of plants and he knew better than to pluck the African violets, but no one told him the Christmas cactus flowers were off limits too. It made sense to him. It didn't make sense to Dad.

The cactus bloomed again the following Christmas. Dad tended the cactus like a sick child, never forgetting -- or letting me forget -- the year Eddie plucked its flowers--nor have I. Of all the bouquets and flowers I've received, those golden cactus blooms are my favorites. Not because they were pretty (they were) or because they were given with my son's smiles and pride at having found flowers for me in the midst of winter. Because the price he paid was in the tears of a child's broken heart for a sin he never realized he had committed.

Now I'm contemplating giving a Christmas cactus to my aunt and I wonder if I should give her the gardenias or something else and give the cactus to Beanie who is so much like Dad. She has most of his plants and she doubtless remembers the story of Eddie's bouquet. It will mean more to her than to my aunt even though my aunt is Dad's sister.

As I eat my warming strawberries and look at flowering gifts to send to a cherished aunt, I can't help wishing for another bouquet of yellow cactus flowers from my son.

Beggar's Night

Tonight, tonight is beggar's night. Don't be stingy and give them a bite -- or two.

I added the "or two" and changed it to them, but that is the rhyme Dad taught me when he took me out on my first Halloween a half-century ago. Sounds like a long time, but those memories are still as fresh as the night we dressed up and went on our first rounds.

This year I didn't buy candy because last year I ended up with too much candy and quite a few caramel apples when no one came. My porch light was on, but I haven't seen a single ghost, goblin, ghoul or princess since I moved here, or anywhere in the neighborhood since I moved to the Springs. Parents take their kids to shopping malls and schools to do their trick-or-treating or to parties where I doubt they still bob for apples; they don't take them around the neighborhood. How I miss that.

Someone sent me a Halloween gift, a coffin from the vampire club, and I'd like to thank them. Whoever you are, thank you. You made my Halloween brighter and a little bit more special.

As the moon rises full and bright in the dark sky and passes towards the far horizon, the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead thins and ghosts pass into our world. Treat them gently and feed them well, but let them go before the morning sun rises to dispell the dream. They are only here for one night. When we feed the apparitions who come to the door, we honor the dead and feed them.

Tonight I honor my father who loved Halloween as much as I and imparted a joy and happiness every day of the year with his stories and jokes and his ever present smile and laughter.

Happy Halloween, Dad.

Treading memory's waters

Snow a couple days ago and snow again this morning, off and on under such a dirty gray sky the sun cannot be seen. It's probably hiding or taking a vacation or just isn't strong enough this morning to clean the celestial windows. Whatever the reason, I am grateful for the soft white fall of autumn's ashes softening the ragged edges of the summer's bounty that drags the remaining ragged flags of brown, desiccated leaves from the skeletal trees. Like most men going bald, the trees look better clean and trimmed of delusions of summer. That's what evergreens are for with their year-round proof that the world is sometimes green.

A faint scent of coconut milk and jasmine tea lingers in the house this morning and an empty bowl sits on the nightstand why I write this. I've been up since before five and have spent most of the morning lingering among people I haven't seen for almost thirty years, remembering and adding insights from a distant where I am sufficiently divorced from the fear and feelings of hopelessness that I can see what I was hidden and overlaid with chaotic emotions. I've added things I didn't know at the time and used things I heard after the fact to springboard back into the deep end of time's waters to make a better story. Although the book could be considered memoir, I've decided to let fiction carry the weight of memory and experience and set myself free to imagine what was and could have been.

Mary Ann reminded me that I should be writing and finishing this book so I can submit it to the publisher anxiously and patiently waiting for me to get on with it. She's made her first submission and is feeing quite vindicated that it ended in rejection, but there's nothing to feel vindicated about. Try the same publisher in a few months or a year and the response could be very different, acceptance instead of rejection. Rejection is such a hard and hurtful word to the writer dipping a toe in professional waters. Don't take it personally. It could have been a bad day and everyone got rejected without a reading or the editor or editor's assistant decided that everyone gets a rejection without being read because they were tired from too much Halloween candy that will never make it to the beggar's bowl. Editors are people and rejections subjective. It's no reason to quit writing or submitting. Remember all the best selling authors who couldn't even get arrested for flagrant grammar violations before someone took a chance and published their work. Now they're free to promiscuously pad their word counts with adjectives, dangling modifiers and split infinitives to their hearts' content.

Oh, well, c'est la vie écrire. Such is the writing life. And to my writing life I shall return to wallow in companionship and alienation and abandonment just like the real thing. It's one of those weeks.

That is all. Disperse.,

He gave me music

Someone reminded me of how music connects us to each other and to the memories of the past, so I went back in time and pulled this from my memories.

"If music be the food of love, play on. Let me have surfeit of it that I may sicken and die." ~William Shakespeare - Twelfth Night

Music and love, interconnected. Informing and reforming. Music of the spheres -- celestial and human.

He gave me music.

Whenever our paths crossed he offered a new song, a new offering of love. We were in the moment, the heat of love and desire where it's hard to see or think. Thwarted desire clears the vision and let's you see the truth hidden in the lines.

Music swirls through your mind and heart, firing emotion and kindling desire. The meaning of the words are colored and distorted.

In disappointment you shed tears of loss and loneliness and sing the words while the music wraps you around with memories of thwarted love. Through the tears and pain the words take on a new meaning. You see the truth.

They weren't for you. They were words of his pain, his loneliness. They were meant for someone else. He offered them to you because he wanted to feel those emotions, feel that fire again. But it was a lie. You were a substitute. It was never meant to be.

The music was a gift, an offering of love, a remembrance and a plea to save him from loneliness, a dream of the past when love was innocent and young, new as the first crocus that pops its head above the snow with the first blush of color. A promise of the bright fire of living summer and the blazing death of autumn fighting for the last moment of sunshine and warmth.

Youth and innocence can be remembered. They cannot be recaptured. Experience and life change the color and music of innocence. Pain and loneliness mark innocence and youth. It is in the eyes, those deep windows to the soul. It's in the music when you listen. Desire and memories are in the music, too.

He offered me his heart, scarred by disappointment and loneliness, lost love and hope. It wasn't for me. We had changed too much. Innocence was gone. Time and tide battered our souls on the rocks. We needed understanding and were caught up in need and desire. It was an illusion, a mirage. An image of desire in the heated desert of loneliness. Reaching toward the soft shimmering shapes of our heart's deepest desire, we forget the desert, the relentless heat of the burning sun, the dry taste of defeat. It isn't in us to give up until we have been so battered by the pitiless sun and crushed by the waves of chance and circumstance all hope is gone.

Through the tears and pain I finally saw the truth. I was his first love. She was his last and still held his heart hostage. He didn't see it. He was caught in the mirage, the memory of innocent love past.

It's hard to forget your first love. Time softens the hard edges and mutes the glaring colors. It's harder to forget your last love because it's imprint is fresh and deep, hard and harsh and blinding. We look away from the glare toward the softer light of innocent love, first love. Last love, mature love leaves an indelible mark on our soul. It's there in the words wrapped around with pain and music.

He offered me music -- her music. He offered me love -- the love she spurned and he still carried like a torch in his heart. I kept the music and returned the love. It belongs to another. I still have the first love. She has the last. And I have my last love, mature love, the one I have waited for all my life.

Pain sweeps away innocence and leaves you scarred and raw. Pain also remodels your heart and makes you ready for the future. Pain opens the deep places where true love will take root and flourish. You can't plant the seed until the earth is wounded. Raw and bleeding it accepts the seed, nourishes it and gives birth to life, a flush of color that deepens and blazes with time until it produces seeds and roots to bring it life again and again until there is no more nourishment in the soil or the life giving sun of regard.

I remember the innocent love. I cherish the last love...mature everlasting strong and resilient true love.

Tropical exile

I don't like being rushed and I don't like being late, which puts me in the category of being up late nights or very early mornings or rushing when I need to slow down and take my time. That's the way it is these days. Just when I think I have things under control and have a little time for reading, I end up falling asleep -- even with really good books. Not good when I am reading a book that begs to be savored slowly and rolled around the senses and mind to get every bit of literary juice. Oh, well, now that the rush is over and I have a few minutes . . .

For some reason, John has been on my mind the past few days. John was a strange man with horn-rimmed glasses, a crew cut, loose bowling shirts (without the team name) and a penchant for decimating chicken bones for cartilage and marrow. He lived in Colon in a palatial apartment filled with neat stacks of newspapers and magazines that lined narrow aisles down which he scuttled. Although his hair and eyes were dark, his skin was almost colorless, pasty white like a cockroach deprived of sun and light. He reminded me of a cockroach, all dry rustling and skittering feet between his stacks of newspapers and magazines. He was also quite smart, although there was some talk that he had been exiled to Panama because his mother, a high-powered executive at Revlon Cosmetics, was embarrassed by him.

As a child he fascinated me even as he repulsed my mother and he fascinates me still. I've imagined all kinds of stories with him as villain and hero, an unlikely hero to be sure, with his dry cockroach rustlings and quiet encyclopedic intelligence, and I've imagined all kinds of reasons for his exile, things that never occurred to me as a child in 1963. He was unusual and very different from the rest of the crowd of adults that converged on our fourplex on stilts at the edge of the jungle.

Although he's been on my mind, and I'm not certain why, I couldn't remember his last name. His face and mannerism and presence are indelibly etched deeply in my memories, but not his last name, so I called Mom to ask her. She said she didn't remember and then, miraculously, "John Kane. Kane was his last name. I don't know how I remembered his name." She remembered because he gave her the creeps and even now she shudders when she says his name and evokes his memory like a hideous demon from the depths of some infernal hell. The moment I said, "chicken bones," she knew who I meant.

John Kane. Or maybe it's John Cain. I wonder if there was an Abel he slew back in the States and that's why he was exiled from high society and his mother's fashionable digs. She certainly wouldn't have tolerated his newspapers or magazines or his dry rustling skitter across the expensive carpets and important Italian tiles of her New York apartment or her estate in the country surrounded by wrought iron gates and guarded by men in blue collared uniforms hiding like Jacks in the box in their guard shacks outside the spiked gates. In the South, an embarrassing or eccentric relative is a sign of old money and interest, but in the North, such a relative was exiled to some poor South or Central American country where they could live in some luxury at very little expense to the family, an aberration consigned to tropical oblivion.

I've often wondered if John Kane still lives in the palatial apartment down the street from the Molotov cocktail singed Masonic Temple where my father went once a week to practice arcane rituals. That's where he met John Kane, the only man among their friends who wasn't in the Army and didn't live on base. And I wonder where John's mark of Kane would be found.

It wasn't on the high pale escarpment of his forehead or on the dark brushy plateau of his crew cut. The precipice of his nose was jutted out between the black horn-rimmed frame of his glasses in sharp relief to his smooth white cheeks where not even the shadow of a beard lurked beneath the skin of his cheeks or chin and his eyes, although stark black balls that hid the wide abyss of the pupils, were arresting, but not marked in any unusual way. Beneath the loose cotton shirts of sober color, hints of once hard muscle brushed briefly against the smooth, ironed cloth in sharp contrast to the mystery his sharply creased charcoal trousers concealed. Pasty white arms devoid of hair and thin in comparison to the solid bulk of his chest and shoulders ended in decisive and strong hands used with delicacy and grace, perhaps the hands of a one-time dancer, the nails buffed to a high gloss and his cuticles immaculate. His clothes were of good quality, but I never understood his fondness for canvas mesh shoes with gum soles, unless they gave him purchase on the marble tiles that comprised the floor of his apartment as he scurried from one towering pile of information to the next.

I imagine that when computers became household items his newspaper and magazine edifices were exchanged for desks and serried rows of computers, cursors blinking heartbeats of information waiting to be consumed the way John Kane consumed chicken bones, until even the inside of the bones were sucked clean of marrow.

It's funny, but I can't remember how John Kane smelled or if he had a smell. His apartment smelled of dust and paper and tropical breezes that fingered through the shuttered windows. Even now, he fascinates me and probably always will, the strangely intelligent and quiet albino cockroach rustling dryly among his stacks of words and pictures and ideas far from the glittering social whirl of New York and Chicago and the wealth compound of his mother's cosmetics empire, a tropical exile.

Tarot: A sword divides past and present

The past and the present are tricky. Spend too much time in the past and waste the present. Spend too much time dealing with the present and ignoring the lessons and experiences of the past and life becomes one-dimensional. There has to be a balance, but how do we find that balance?

Today was an unbalanced day for me, but I finally managed to get it together and concentrate on today's tarot post. I am not surprised that Mercury is in retrograde because communications have been on the fritz. It was so much easier in the past, but it's best not to dwell in the past and risk losing what is available in the present, although it's nice to have the option. Or is it?



The Queen of Cups is intensely sensitive to others' feelings and can seem like she's reading their minds. In a way, she is a mind reader because she pays attention to the details. Don't let her romantic looks and the far away look in her eyes fool you. She is focused on a dream and, although she seems slightly tragic and moody, thinking about ill fated princesses in fairy tales, she is deeply concerned for the welfare of others. That is what gives her insight. She has been down those roads and knows what it feels like to be poor, in pain, loved and lost. She has done and felt it all.

The Queen of Cups' heart is engaged with deep concern for loved ones and her own emotional well being. She knows that things aren't perfect, but sees the sensual beauty of the life around her. Her message is simple: Look to the needs of the heart. Don't be bewitched or swayed by emotion and don't let emotion overshadow the truth or reality until the truth is no longer visible.

It's one thing to be concerned about people and another to be so arrogant and controlling that people are no longer allowed to make mistakes and learn from them. That is how people learn, but making mistakes and fixing them. It's a heady feeling playing god/dess, but it's not so heady for those who are smothered by such overly attentive care. Remember the butterfly struggling out of its cocoon. Help it and it dies. Let it struggle and it will be strong enough to feed itself and live to procreate.



In the garden of childhood, before Pandora came with her mysterious box full of hardship, woe and illness, children played in verdant fields and filled their cups with flowers and animals. It was an enchanted time. In the foreground of the Six of Cups is a cat. It is clearer and more real than the idyllic scene behind it. The cat is the present and the happy, laughing children are the past, a memory of happy times.

Memories are tricky. Memories can evoke happiness, warmth and security when life was young and innocent, inspiring us to share the nostalgic, romanticized remembrance of things past. Too much time spent reliving and remembering the past can cause profound sadness and disappointment with the current situation, fraught with the ills and evils that flew out of Pandora's chest of gifts for mankind. In memory, the past is always better than what is available now, but was it so wonderful? Were things so much better? Were there not problems to solve and people and situations that broke the heart?

The Six of Cups reminds us to pick and choose our memories careful and remember that time and distance, and current desires, have a tendency to color the past in soft, water washed colors. The way to deal with the past is to remember the good, accept the bad without question and balance it all with the needs of the present, use logic and reality to show the best path forward. If the past controls all actions, the path will never be clear and life will slip out of control. It's a matter of balance. Isn't it always?



A sharp sword cut through the Gordian knot and solved a riddle; it was the keen edge of intellect and the rational mind, the sign of the Ace of Swords. But with power comes danger. The Sword of Truth will cut through the toughest problems with ease. It is the tool of the complex mind and the mind is the key to controlling reality.

The Ace of Swords is the symbol of communication and the weapon of communication are words, words that can hurt as well as heal. The sword bring the gift of thought, a gift that grants the ability to see the world clearly, communicate effectively and create a happy and healthy environment, a stable reality. Sharp words spoken with unguarded thought can destroy it all. A clever wit is a blessing, but it can be a curse if it is used to hurt or destroy. With the Ace of Swords, the Sword of Truth confers the desire for honesty, and that is its guard and guide in order to know where and how to strike. It's in your hands.

* * *

A man sits at a bar drinking a glass of soda. He doesn't drink alcohol because he likes to remain in control. His world is about to spin out of control.

A group of men come up to him and address him but name. He doesn't know them and it turns out they don't know him. They've made a mistake. Someone with the same name is scheduled to appear and give a talk, but no one knows what he looks like. It's a subject with which he is familiar, and speaking to the group will make it possible to drag himself away from the edge of the abyss of despair and depression. He agrees to talk to the group and has such a good time an idea occurs to him.

His name is common and a quick Google search provides tens of thousands of men with the same name, many of whom are the same age, so why not try on their lives for a while, see what it's like had another path been chosen, and possibly find a life that makes him happier than his own. Research will provide enough background and he can relive his youth when anything in the world was possible before he chose the wrong path and ended up miserable and trapped in a marriage with a wife who doesn't respect him and controls his actions. He had a chance at love, but waited too long to take it. If he can't have love, he might as well have a little adventure . . . as long as no one gets hurt.

No doubt, my mood affects my creative vision today, but it happens. Best not to dwell on it. I still have next week and three new cards to tempt the muse. Where will the muse take you with these cards?