I’ve just returned from 10 days in Texas with the woman I have loved as a sister all my life. Mary Carol came with her younger brother to live in our home at 16 after spending 10 years in an orphanage. Her father (my father’s brother) and mother both died of cancer when she was six and her brother was just 18 months. Six months later I was born, so she was there as long as I can remember. You kind of think life will go on forever until a certain age. You think that the...
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{This post is part of a series of excerpts from my forthcoming book. It is continued from last Monday.} View From The Floor Secretly, privately, the creative voice in me longed for expression. With the same guitar in my arms, on Saturday afternoons when every other girl was outside, I sat on the floor in the dorm and wrote songs of longing and discontent. View from the Floor Always sitting on the floor. Guitar in hand, on the floor, in hand, on the floor. A single...
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God Is In The Guitar At 14, I picked up the guitar. Three easy chords to that first song—House of the Rising Sun—moved me. Perhaps it was the vibration of the instrument in my arms. Like my Arabian horses, the guitar was another relationship, between a very limited human girl and the mysterious, uncontrollable force I longed for. I started to write songs. They were desperate songs, angry songs; but the voices inside me that could not find expression anywhere else, found...
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Spirit Breaking Free Outside school, my mother ensured that I was exposed to all the traditional art forms. There I dared to dream, to explore, to reach out for something more. My introduction to creativity was learning-how rather than listening-to. There were lessons for everything, starting at age six. There was dance—ballet, tumbling and tap—which I adored but did not continue. There were piano lessons with Mrs. Clark—strict, academic and constricted—and the terrible...
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I saw my dear friend Penny come up on Skype last night. I haven’t talked with her in a while, so I jotted a few words down; as soon as I had hit Return, she called. Her 39-year old single daughter is undergoing treatment for breast cancer right now. She’s had a mastectomy, and is about to finish a round of chemo that has cost her her hair, made her very sick, and seems linked to other problems still not explained. Another long time friend, a year older than me, also has...
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