Song Challenge: Day 14

Today’s challenge is “a song you liked hearing at a wedding.” I sat here thinking of all the weddings I’ve been to in my life, and the only songs that immediately came to mind are from marriages that ended in divorce. For all those weddings I’ve been to where couples are still together, I can’t remember their music! My advice to people getting married is: Pick music or songs you’ll continue to feel affection for no matter how things end up, and don’t let anybody talk you out of your music choices. That music may be among your best memories.

“Colour My World” is the first song I taught myself on piano. Yes, it was played at a wedding. My first one.

Song Challenge: Day 13


Some beautiful fabric squares Debby gave me at Christmas. I haven’t decided what to do with them yet, but I know I will.

Today’s challenge is “a song you like from the ’70s.” That’s the decade with the shifting variety of music that probably most influenced me, so where would I begin? I reached back to 1971 for a song that in my soul remains larger than a single artist, time, or place.

Wikipedia provides an an interesting account of the history of “What’s Going On” and Marvin Gaye.

Tiny Tuesday and Song Challenge: Day 12

Happy birthday today to my nephew Josh!


A song I got tired of hearing long ago… In June of 1974, the Lynyrd Skynyrd song “Sweet Home Alabama” was released on their album Second Helping. I lived in Alabama then. By July of 1974, I was pretty sure I’d heard it at least three times a day for a month, and that might have just been on the 8-track tape player in my boyfriend’s car.

It became the Inescapable Song not only because I lived in Alabama, but because I later went to the college known simply as “Alabama.” The record was played on the sound systems in bars and clubs. It was performed by anyone with a guitar anywhere they could stand or sit with a pick and an audience of one to infinity. It was played at ball games loud enough to reach the outermost/uppermost row of any stadium, gym, or auditorium, not to mention every dorm on campus. Tailgate parties. Blaring from every frat house.

It.never.ended. It still hasn’t.

The interesting thing is, “Sweet Home Alabama,” like so many songs, is an overlooked protest against some of the things it seems to be praising. I salute that and include it with many protest songs people misuse because they hear only those lyrics that seem to glorify what they admire/revere. There’s always hope that after somebody takes a hit off that pipe or bong or joint and lies in the dark listening to the song again, they’ll suddenly think, Hey, wait a minute…

Cool. I just don’t want to hear it again.

Last week, I had a bad experience in a local store. It was not because of the store or any worker in the store or any other customer in the store. It was just a set of circumstances that hit me at a time when I was not feeling well for a range of reasons. I realized I wasn’t doing well when I stood up from the chair where I waited and began to pace. Among other things, I recognized that my blood sugar was dropping quickly. I went to a cooler and bought a sugary drink, and when I walked back to my chair, I spotted something dark beneath it.


It was this tiny plastic turtle smaller than my palm. I almost always rescue lost toys, especially when they’re small. This one seemed fortuitous. Just breathe, I told myself. Be slow and steady, like the turtle. Think of how long turtles can live. How most of what they need they carry with them, and nature provides the rest. From now on, when you hit these spots, just remember turtle wisdom.

It worked in that moment. Later, back at home, I wondered if the turtle is now my totem animal. That led me to think of the word factotum, defined as “a person having many diverse activities or responsibilities.” I named this little turtle Fac and hope thinking of him in future moments where too much is coming at me and from within me all at once, I can remember to step back and breathe.

So today, instead of a song I never want to hear again, I offer The Turtles’ 1967 hit “Happy Together,’ which I don’t mind hearing at all.

Today is also the birthdate of our late friend Tim R. He’d like this turtle story.

Song Challenge: Day 9

Today’s challenge, a song that makes me happy? Without fail, “Love Street” by The Doors. According to someone, who on these two cards calls himself “Stupid” and lives at 301 Lonely Lane, or “Lover,” living in Circle House in Jacksonville, FLA with an unknown zip code (because he was right across town from me in Jacksonville, ALA–if you remember when states didn’t have two code abbreviations, you may be old), anywhere I live is Love Street. He’s also put my birthday on the postmark, and it’s 1971. We were so young. He’s drawn himself on the “BIRTHDAY Stamp.” Apparently at that time, stamps were 6 cents (I checked–it jumped to 8 cents in May of that year).

Could not number the times Riley put on The Doors’ Waiting For The Sun album and dropped the needle on this song. Clearly, picking this month to take on a song challenge was inviting a flood of memories of the man who called me his muse from the time we were children. (We did not think of ourselves as children then, but now that I’m 135, I know we were.)

Song Challenge: Day 8

Today’s challenge, “a song you like with a food in the title,” was super easy, not only to think of immediately but to snag a live video, because some artists never have (or had) trouble filling a venue for live shows.

When you have a monstrous appetite, this can definitely take the edge off.

I present Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band performing “Cheeseburger In Paradise.” How do you like yours (and I know some of those burgers are plant-based, which I fully support)?

Happy birthday, Riley. I love you.

Song Challenge: Day 7

I had an appointment to go to so I turned Thursday into a day of errands: dropping off clothing donations, making a rare visit to the wonderful Texas Art Supply (it used to be so convenient in the old ‘hood, and today they gave me a bunch of help) to buy a couple of gifts and goodies, filling up the car with gas, and grabbing Starbucks along the way.

I have a car playlist called “Driving,” and since today’s song challenge is “a song to drive to,” I switched to it. Songs include Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” U2’s “California (There Is No End To Love),” Jackson Browne’s “Chasing You Into the Light,” One Republic’s “Come Home,” Paul Young’s “Everytime You Go Away,” Wesley Dean’s “Hello, I Love You, Goodbye,” Gladys Knight & The Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia,” and Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider,” “Multi Colored Lady,” and “Please Call Home.”

All excellent songs and fun to sing with as I drive, but for this challenge, I’m sharing what may be my favorite song to drive to or even think about driving to. I love to hear it, sing it, and make up stories to it and have been doing so since I first heard it in 1971. I made an entire video in my head to accompany this song before videos were a thing, and I still remember my mental video all these years later for Carole King’s “Carry Your Load” from the great album Music. Give it a listen if you haven’t heard it or want the nostalgia of remembering it.

I have two of those Barbie convertibles, one from Margret via Lynne, and one from Nurse Lisa. THANK YOU!

Song Challenge: Day 6

Today’s challenge, “a song that makes you want to dance,” reminds me that I’m a person who wants to dance WHILE no one’s watching, not LIKE no one’s watching. I wish I still had access to my family’s home movies that I lost in a computer meltdown, because I think there was footage of young Becky dancing, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

I never went to school dances and even at the mandatory “proms” my last two years of high school, I didn’t dance. My girlfriends and I didn’t dance at slumber parties. I don’t, for example, think I’ve ever seen Lynne dance, and we’ve been friends since we were twelve. During our teen era, kids I hung out with were “too cool” to dance, which was fine, because dancing just wasn’t my thing.

Photo © BoDogVintage

In the 1970s, I did go to bars/clubs during the height of the disco era, but I didn’t dance. In the 1980s, when I finally DID dance at clubs and bars, they were usually slow dances, though I absolutely do remember finally dancing to the songs of Prince and Michael Jackson. Resistance was futile. Then, under the influence of my favorite enabler, Kathy, I learned to Texas two-step at country/cowboy bars. My footwear was red ropers like these, which oddly, I donated to Goodwill when I moved to Texas.

So probably the only time in my life when I danced without feeling self-conscious and awkward, I looked a little like this.

And I absolutely know what I danced to. And I always will. When no one’s watching.

Tiny Tuesday! and Song Challenge: Day 5

For some reason Instagram isn’t working for me at all today. I’m taking that as a message to preserve my sanity by knowing as little as possible about how “Super” Tuesday is making people feel and behave. In honor of those who are willing to endure politics with their popcorn, here’s a wee miniature I received recently. Popcorn kernels added for scale.

Since today’s Song Challenge is “A song that needs to be played loud,” I will handle that immediately as I get back to my writing (I don’t know if this song is referenced in the Neverending Saga, but Led Zeppelin is, more than once). “Stairway To Heaven” has meaning in my life, but I feel no compulsion to elaborate. (It’s fine if you’re glad about that.)

What do you like to listen to LOUD?

Mood: Monday and Song Challenge: Day 4


Morning Guitar Painting
oil on canvas, date unknown
©Elaine Fleck, USA

Riley, date and photographer unknown

From my earliest years, I liked the Beatles, as I like many artists and bands, but because of Riley’s talent for playing their songs on guitar and piano/keyboards, I learned to love the Beatles. I could listen to him play either instrument for as long as he’d let me, or until my parents made him leave. =) (And with that memory, let me note that today is my late mother’s birthday, and Riley was one of the few boys I knew who she kept liking through the decades.)

No matter how many songs Riley played, there would always be one for me, every time, on guitar. Though in this photo, he’s performing on keyboards, my mind will always go to that one song, one guitar, one boy. Any time this song (and a few other songs special to both of us) comes up in my Instagram feed, whether or not those are accounts I follow, I think of it as a message and leave a four-character comment on the post that’s meant to convey, Yes, my friend, I’m thinking of you, too. Riley’s birthday is in four days. How I’d love to be able to say those words in person or even on the phone. I will never stop missing him or appreciating everything we did and said and felt and wrote and listened to in all those years of friendship. I will love him always.

Today’s challenge is “a song that reminds you of someone.”

Book your appointment at The Zen Goat

Before Janna Rollins’s debut cozy mystery An Escape Goat: A Zen Goat Mystery begins, Callie Haybeck, a young woman living in Seattle, has never quite lived up to her older sister’s life choices. The one thing Callie’s proud of is her certification as a yoga instructor, but the Covid pandemic derailed her career, leaving her to daydream of one day having a yoga practice on a tropical beach. After learning about long-lost members of her family and meeting them, an idea was born: Callie would move to Haybeck Farm in New Hampshire and open a yoga studio, The Zen Goat. Classes would include adorable baby goats and lure tourists from their hectic city lives to the bucolic countryside.

From the moment the book opens at the start of Callie’s first four-day yoga retreat, things go awry. Though she loves the baby goats, she’s fighting an unexpected allergy–to goats. Along with the babies, she also rescued an adult goat, Bugsy, who always finds ways out of his enclosure. Her first clients, a group of four affluent women from Boston, including a social media influencer and her best frenemy, along with a ballerina and a medical student, all accompanied by a male driver/assistant, have arrived ahead of schedule with enough tension among them to defy even goat yoga. The influencer’s chihuahua, Matilda, immediately darts away to face off with Bugsy. When Callie hurries from the farmhouse to rescue the dog, her clients aren’t impressed by her frazzled appearance, especially when she falls and gets goat “raisins” caught in her braids. Matilda takes an instant dislike to her and bites her. After she finally gets the women and dog ushered into the guest cottage, Callie learns the massage therapist and esthetician she’s booked for the spa day that her clients requested during their retreat can’t make it.

From those opening minutes, the book offers mishaps, mayhem, and murder with a lively range of characters; an abundance of motives and secrets; relatives from both sides of the Haybeck family who want Callie off the farm; an adventurous great-aunt; and a handsome veterinarian who thinks Callie’s the last person who should have goats in her care. It’s all set against the kindness of family and a charming small town that may make Callie’s dream of a tropical escape fade a little more each day.

An Escape Goat, available March 12, 2024, from Level Best Books, checks all my favorite boxes: snappy dialogue, engaging, layered characters, a good mystery, and funny situations. I look forward to reading future books in the series. Who wants to book a retreat at The Zen Goat with me? I promise to leave my own neurotic chihuahua at home.

Read and reviewed from an ARC and cross-posted to Goodreads.