Tag: friends

Houston Pride

You may remember this shot from last year’s Parade.

Here’s this year’s version (“Where’s Rex?”):

It was a great day of Pride, starting with my breakfast at Baby Barnaby’s. I wish they were open all day, because I’m rarely out and about early enough to eat breakfast there.

I have three small stickers on the back of my car which are badly faded. I decided it’s time to replace them, so I went to Hollywood Video/Books to see if I could find duplicates. I got a new PFLAG sticker no problem. But when I asked the cashier about a red ribbon, all I got was a blank look. He honestly didn’t know what a red ribbon is for! I’m still trying to get my head around that.

However, their former manager had bought tons of our books for us to sign. After all these years, there’s one lone copy of The Deal remaining. I thought about buying it–it’s out of print and I only have a couple of copies myself. I decided it’s just waiting for the right reader and left it there.

For the rest of my Pride photos, check out my Flickr set. If you do a slide show, you won’t see titles and captions, but if you go through them individually, I’ve tried to identify most of what I shot.

Button Sunday

Saturday morning, a friend I hadn’t seen since 1988 was in town with her husband and four sons for a family member’s wedding. I was a little nervous about seeing her again. Our lives went in such different directions, and even though I always loved her, what if I wasn’t the person she expected me to be? What if we didn’t have anything to talk about?

A few minutes after we met up, we were riding down the escalator to the Starbucks in her hotel. She said being at an event like this (the wedding) without having control of everything was unusual for her because she’s a control freak. I kind of glanced back at her and said, “YOU?” in a tone that made it clear I remembered this about her. Then I said, “My friends say that about me now.” And she grinned and answered, “You always were.”

Five minutes later, we were drinking the same Starbucks drinks (mocha frappuccinos), catching up on family news, discussing politics (her older brothers helped shape my political views way back when), and just being with each other. Later, when the valet brought my car while she was waiting for her husband to bring their rental from the garage, she walked toward it as if she knew it was mine. I said, “Oh, there’s my car.” She said, “I was about to get in it automatically because I have the same car at home!” The only difference is that mine is one year older than hers.

Maybe our lives did go in different directions, but in all the ways that matter–much more than our choices of coffee and cars–we’re still connected. I was as comfortable as I’ve always been with her, as if it hadn’t been twenty years since our last meeting. When I mentioned that to Lindsey on Saturday night, she said, “That’s a real friend.”

Yep. Some things can’t be controlled. They just are.


In 1975.


And now.

My week in words and pictures

Someone asked me recently about a post I did that “disappeared.” A lot of times when I write about something private–especially having to do with my family or friends–I’ll keep it public long enough for it to be read by them. Once I know they’ve seen it, I’ll make it private, which means it stays in my archives for me to see, but it’s no longer accessible to the public or even to my LJ friends. I can’t make those posts “friends only” because–weirdly–not everyone has a LJ account. I know; it mystifies me, too.

This is one of those “Dear Diary posts,” so I’ll put it behind a cut and y’all can skip the boring minutiae of my daily life because honestly, I know it’s not that riveting. It’s just my chance to include far-away family and friends in things they’d normally be part of.

my week in words and pictures

Silly Love Songs

Today, as Marika pointed out to me, is Paul McCartney’s birthday. I’ve made no secret on LJ of how much the Beatles and their music mean to me, so I won’t revisit that today, though I do wish Paul a happy sixty-sixth. I celebrate the life of this man who has so impacted our world with what he calls his “silly love songs”–not just because of the music itself, which would be enough, but the way that music has given him money and prestige he often uses to help heal our planet and its inhabitants.

It’s actually not one of Sir Paul’s silly love songs that has been on my mind. Yesterday, when reading that old entry about Tim’s art and writing bad poetry in response to MGH’s challenge, I could not get Chicago’s “Colour My World” out of my brain. I finally just had to go buy and download the damn thing so I could wallow in memories. (You, however, can listen to it for free courtesy of youtube.)

I suppose I was a bit of a Chicago fan, probably in part because of a surprise party Lynne gave me on what I think was my fifteenth birthday. I still have decorations from that party as well as vivid memories of some of the people there–Lynne, of course, and Susie and Gale and Tim G. and Riley, among others. Bonus photo from among my very favorites:


Tim G. and Riley looking like poster teens for illegal drugs and underage drinking.

At that birthday party, Alan I., who I barely knew, gave me a DOUBLE Chicago album, which was almost like going steady if I hadn’t already been Tim’s girlfriend and one of Riley’s obsessions. I remember the party as among the last of the happy times, because it wasn’t long after that when my parents moved us to a smaller town and yanked me into another school (to get me away from the poster teens for illegal drugs and underage drinking).

Since my parents had promised, SWORN, that they would never make me change schools again–thereby luring me to form real, lasting friendships for the first time in my life–I was one very angry teenager. That’s why they came up with The Bribe:

A piano and piano lessons. The first thing I did on the piano was painstakingly teach myself how to play “Colour My World.” I’m sure hearing that a thousand times a day made Bill and Dorothy sincerely regret The Bribe, but as they say, payback is hell.

I never progressed beyond the simplest music with my piano lessons. “Colour My World” would be played at my first wedding, and four years later, after my divorce, selling that piano (with my parents’ okay) brought me some much needed cash. Eventually, I would give my complete collection of Chicago albums, even the one from Alan, to Ed D., who sang at my second wedding twenty years ago today.

This has been a year of great loss for me–Riley and my mother–and I am having some rough moments. Still, I know that I will be okay because of silly love songs and all the people who color my world with hope and love. Thank you–and happy anniversary, Tom.

for my reference, previous posts about Riley

Pigeon feather

This is in response to a challenge I accepted from Mark G. Harris.

I wrote a post called the Secrets of Tim
(a title I stole from the Secret of NIMH,
a movie I didn’t happen to see–
I need to stop writing parenthetically)

I extolled the talents of my Gemini friend–
his novels, his singing, his playing violin,
the life he lures from seeds planted in soil,
his muted rainbows on canvas in oil

I mourned a painting once lost to the sky
Then a secret I found set my heart free to fly
If you’re finding this doggerel to be a bit dim
I suggest you check out The Secrets of Tim

The first of I don’t know how many posts today

Or maybe it’ll be my only post today. We’ll see.

Greg Herren is supposed to read from James Joyce’s work at the Garden District Bookshop’s Bloomsday Celebration tonight. Wish I could be there.

On this day in 1904, James Joyce took a walk in Dublin with a chambermaid he’d met at a hotel. Their outing became the basis for Leopold Bloom’s fictional odyssey in Ulysses, another of those books I’ve never read. And the chambermaid, Nora Barnacle, became Joyce’s lover, companion, wife, and muse.

One of the most fun parts of writing fiction is when some chance moment from life–a meeting, an overheard conversation, a vignette told to me, a piece of art, a song, or a photograph–either inspires something I’m writing or gets woven into one of my novels. If the story hasn’t involved me directly, I generally ask and am given permission to use it.

Lynne has family in town, and last night I had a conversation with Aunt Lil. She’s never read Three Fortunes in One Cookie so it was fun to tell her some of the little stories I “borrowed” from her family for Phillip and his family. Though those things we writers lift from our lives may not have the impact on the literary canon that Nora Barnacle had, I think everyone’s fiction becomes a little truer and more alive because of them.


Aunt Lil with her great-great niece, Lila.