Tag: riley

still working at this

There’s another part of my problem with Facebook that I haven’t talked about, so here I go.

Other people have this experience from different angles–parents’ jobs, broken families, etc.–but when you are a military brat, there’s one thing you can be sure of. Change. You will not have one hometown, one school, one set of friends through your childhood and adolescence. If you’re lucky, you’ll get two years in one place, but more likely one year.

I have no complaints about this. When I balance what I learned and the wealth and diversity of my formative years against the sacrifices of change, I embrace the best and accept the not-so-great for what it was: preparation for the shifts and curves and sheer drop-offs that I’ve traveled on life’s road.

Even though I got lucky because of my father’s Army retirement and had a few more years in one place (sort of: three towns close together and only two high schools in six years), after that, I was on the move. Tuscaloosa. Back home. Tuscaloosa. Montgomery. Tuscaloosa. Huntsville, and then Texas. Each of those moves involved different homes, different sets of friends, different jobs and coworkers, different romances.

Those moves also meant a lot of contacts and friendships that faded away. I have a core group of friends who were part of my teenage and undergraduate years–I think there were eight of us–Lynne, Liz, Riley, Debbie, Carreme, Joseph, Kathy, me; we are down to five now. They are not all connected to one another, but they are all connected to me and know of one another. Regardless of the scarcity of times we talk or see each other, I can pick up the phone and call, or text or email, and it’ll be like we’ve never been apart. That’s a huge gift, and I treasure it.

Since three of the eight have died, we have mourned our losses together. We have celebrated one another’s weddings and the births of children and grandchildren. We have consoled each other through broken relationships and lost jobs. We have felt each others’ losses to death of parents, spouses, family members including siblings, a niece and a nephew, and friends.

All of that is a lot, and we were only eight in number. What happened when people from all the different parts of my life began finding me on Facebook was that I experienced what people who stay in one place do: ALL of the celebrations and ALL of the losses, except in one condensed, intense place and time.

While it was wonderful to hear all the good news and I was happy for it, it was overwhelming to hear all the other news. The sicknesses. The heartbreaks. The deaths. I can smile over the birth of another grandchild, send best wishes for any happy event, and move on. But I know too well from my own experience how losses are not just a moment and then a move forward. The shock of death, the years of grieving–these are not the stuff for an “I’m so sorry” and then just moving along. I hurt for these losses and because we are aging, there were so many. It was like every hometown, every school, every person I’d known was all right there, every day, on Facebook.

Adding all of that to the other shocks of reconnecting with people I knew long ago and finding out the changes in their politics and personalities–I think it’s good to have some people fixed in time as one part of your life and let them stay there. I got a call one time from a long-ago friend, and after talking about how we were all getting older, he said, “But do you still have your beautiful skin?” I could only laugh and say, “I’m like everyone else. I weigh more. I have more wrinkles. I don’t look the way I used to look. You just hold on to that girl in your mind and let her be the one you see. We all need our illusions.”

I need my illusions, too.

I will always be grateful that when I got the shocking news that Riley had died, Susan B, who made me aware (thinking I already knew!) was sensitive to the devastation it caused. She had no intention of being the one who told me. She wasn’t there to see me fall apart, to run to Tim and sob incoherently in his arms because I couldn’t believe it and didn’t think I could bear it. (Poor Tim thought my mother had died, but that didn’t happen until four months later. In another part of this pain, when I told her about Riley, who of course SHE had known for as many years as I had, it was one of the things she couldn’t take in because of her Alzheimer’s. She couldn’t remember who Riley was. The person who’d always been my refuge was disappearing, too.)

Susan B wasn’t with me, but she realized the effect of her news, because she said kind, compassionate things to me. Twelve years later, she and I are still in touch through Instagram, where we can like and comment on each other’s posts. Even though we weren’t “best” friends, we had a lot in common and we were definitely friends throughout our school years. Our lives are different, our opinions may be different, but it doesn’t matter. We’ll always be connected not just because we knew each other a long time ago, but because in one of the worst moments of my life, when I needed it most, she was kind to me.

It’s a hard fact of life that as we age, we’ll know more loss on every level. It isn’t just friends and family members, or those who taught and ministered to us; the people we never knew who slip away from our lives affect us, too. The ones who shaped national and world history. The artists who inspired us. The people who made and appeared in the movies we loved. The ones who wrote the books that changed us. The ones whose music gave our lives their soundtracks.

Last night, Lynne texted to tell me Jerry Jeff Walker had died. He joins a pantheon of songwriters/musicians lost, and every one of them hurts. I don’t just say, oh, too bad, about people like Jerry Jeff and Tom Petty–and I won’t even add to this list, I’ll just say that all grief is real, and we feel it because we are lucky enough to love and connect.

I’m trying to write a short story right now, and this story is NOT my story with Riley. But it is hitting every damn nerve I have that’s connected to him. So I write a little bit and cry a lot, and I have no idea if anything I write will be worth a damn.

But I’ll keep writing it. I’ll keep writing at all. Because creation is really the only answer some of us have to pain and fury and loss.


Riley, year and photographer unknown

Photo Friday, No. 721

Current Photo Friday theme: Slow

In the early 1970s as bored youngsters needing to use our imaginations, Lynne and I began creating characters. We used people who inspired us, but the stories we concocted around them were all our own inventions.

In the late 1970s, I began to put them on paper as best I could remember them, but I did it from the perspective of someone older, and I did it with a semi-sense of the kind of fiction that I could write using them. It was probably best described at that time as glitz.

In 1980, I destroyed that manuscript. When I did, all fiction writing stopped for me. I embarked on a series of jobs and relationships and mistakes that were my training ground for how not to be an adult. I knew a lot of writers. I could talk about writing. I could certainly talk about novels, short stories, and poems and teach them. But I believed my bad writing breakup was forever.

I thought a lot of breaking up was forever, and my bad choices certainly ensured it.

Then I met Tom, and somewhere on the journey to trusting myself again, I told him about my by then many-years writing block. He said maybe I should consider revisiting those old characters and their stories. Maybe if I resurrected them, my writing would come back to life. Over the next few years, I wrote three novels, with Tom as my reader and advisor and Lynne once again providing creative input of plot and character development as she read them, too.

I wrote those novels while I changed cities and then states. While I embarked on more jobs. While I became HIV-AIDS aware and a LGBT ally. While I finally began to figure out who I was in this world. Some people read the manuscripts and liked them, some people didn’t. It was all okay. The manuscripts were my teachers.

As I lost friends to AIDS one after another, one of them said, “One day, you must tell our stories.” I tried, but nothing I put on paper ever came close. Then I met my writing partners online, and with them, I found a voice and together we wrote our five Manhattan novels (or four Manhattan novels, one mall novel) and were published. Then Timothy and I wrote our two novels and they were published. I wrote two contemporary romances, and they were published. Together, Timothy and I edited three short story anthologies that were published.

By then, I was tired. I started new creative and professional endeavors with sporadic successes. Over the years, I lost my mother and a nephew and beloved dogs. I lost a lifelong friend who had been instrumental in encouraging my creative writing. He was a poet and musician and songwriter, and I had been his muse. I never knew he had been my muse, as well. Life was full of changes and transitions. I was a little lost. I was not writing fiction.

In 2013, I found an organization to work with and then for, and it consumed me. I certainly didn’t have the energy or time to write. In early 2019, I knew I had to make a change. I desperately needed balance, and for me, that means there must be a creative outlet. I had no idea what to do.

They came back to me. All of the characters from my earliest years of their creation. I wondered, How would I write them now? So many years, so many experiences, so many joys and losses behind me, how would they change based on how I’ve changed? No more glitz. No more soap opera. Stories. Their stories.

One day I colored the sketch in the photo, “I Would Find You in Any Lifetime,” and I thought about the love stories in my three novels and about one character in particular. I had missed him so much. I had missed them all. They came back because I needed them. I realized the phrase in the sketch wasn’t only about them. It was about me.

Two months later, I’d written my first 20-plus pages with a plan: same characters, same general plot lines, what I hoped was a better me. I finally accepted that I would have to break all rules to write them and not give a damn about that. The first novel would be two novels. Then three. Now I know it’s going to be four. I’ve written them without the anxiety of publishers and editors, because I honestly don’t care. These are for me. Not for my vanity. For my health and happiness.

They are being read (and not read) as I go along. That isn’t without its frustrations, because the characters and storylines are different from all previous incarnations. I’m writing them organically, and I know where I want to go, but my characters have grown up, too, and I’m learning they don’t always agree with me. That may mean a lot of adjustments later, and it also means I might not express everything the way I mean to for my readers’ preferences and expectations.

I finished the first novel around December 2019 and began the second around February 2020, I think. I’m one chapter away from finishing the second, and then I’m going to do a massive edit to better break up my chapters and fix some bad writing habits. Hopefully lessons learned during the edits will make the third and fourth novels a little less painful to write.

I’m more grateful than anyone could imagine that my wonderful, flawed, sometimes foolish, sometimes wise characters came back to me. Who knew I would need them to focus on during a pandemic? Who knew I would be laid off from my job and social distancing would deny me so much of the comfort and creative energy I share with friends? Who knew all the big plans we made for 2020 would not happen?

The Photo Friday theme is “Slow?” I think I understand the concept. Some relationships take our entire lives of surviving a crazy, unpredictable journey. Some relationships are real–and some are real in another way.

I want them all.

Watch out now

The song “Beware of Darkness” from George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album will be fifty years old in November. The whole album is one I’ve never tired of since Riley gave it to me so many years ago. When Harvey drowned my album, it was already in my iTunes. (And I just realized because of all my computer issues and iTunes making way for Apple Music, it is no longer in my iTunes library. Technology is exhausting.)

This was a free downloadable coloring page I worked on while I had one of those dumb four-day headaches I get. This song was very much on my mind, so I overlaid the title on the page.

I can color in little blocks of time, and one thing about coloring is that it gives me time and opportunity simply to think. Very often, I think about what I’m writing since I can’t actually write when I’m in pain. In fact, after the headache finally stopped, I enjoyed a six-hour writing burst that helped me finish a chapter that I’d been thinking about while coloring this. It is a chapter that is happy in many ways but has a thread of darkness woven into it.

I also think about other things. Relationships and friendships. Things going on in the world. Where I am in relation to others and my environment. How to resist darkness. I’m sure there’s a larger list, but here are the dark things that come to mind: Cynicism. Cruelty. Hate. Dishonesty. Indifference. Hopelessness. War. These are the things that light up my “beware” sense so that I can activate my coping mechanisms.

Coloring is one of those mechanisms. Listening to music is another. I think I’m going to do more of these song/coloring page combinations to celebrate this album that continues to resonate with me.

Bringing it all back home

Where to begin…

Let’s start with my brother and Bob Dylan. No idea, really, which Bob Dylan song I first heard on the radio as a girl. Maybe “Blowing in the Wind?” That’s only a guess. But I do know that my brother was a Bob Dylan fan and was the first person whose knowledge, appreciation, and discussion of Dylan helped me admire his work on new levels.

My friend Riley LOVED Bob Dylan, and we had many conversations about him. I can think of specific songs Riley wrote that were Dylan-influenced. I have a favorite story (real) of when Riley interacted with Bob Dylan in person. A recurring character in Riley’s personal zeitgeist, initials “MVP”–a facet of Riley himself–was Dylanesque.

In college, my friend Kathy and I would listen to our favorite Bob Dylan albums and songs on repeat and have long discussions about them. As a matter, of fact, Kathy and I recently had a text interchange about those favorite Dylan songs. It was a little bit like going home, the way going home mostly is during the pandemic.

Dylan has never bored me. He has shifted gears, reinvented himself, reshaped his music, returned to his music and altered it so many times–and had so many interesting musical relationships through the years–that frankly, I don’t know how any of us can keep up with him. It was so much fun to be able to celebrate a whole new Bob Dylan with Tom through our mutual love for the Traveling Wilburys, founded in 1988, the year Tom and I married.

Bob Dylan is a force. There’ll be no argument from me that he deserved to be the first songwriter to receive a Nobel Price for Literature (in 2016), for, as the Nobel committee said, “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”


Before there was an Internet where anybody’s full set of lyrics are at our fingertips all the time, trying to accurately remember an artist’s songs was a challenge. I was working at a bookstore where we often used the dry erase board in the break room to write a favorite lyric, and one day, someone wrote a line from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and PRAISE TO ALL BOOKSELLER GODS, my struggle to recall the rest of the lyrics was alleviated because the little beauty pictured above was on our shelves for me to purchase and still treasure.

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Recently, I wrote a song (more accurately, one of my characters, a musician, wrote a song). But though I can be a lyricist (good or bad, not important right now), I can’t write music. To write these lyrics, I listened to a Dylan favorite, “Sara,” and wrote as if that were the music that would accompany my songwriter’s lyrics. It helped me with cadence, rhythm, and mood. (And as that character says in one of my novels, “They always want Dylan.” Must also hat tip Lynne here for “All Along the Watchtower.”)

On June 6, I lost a friend of 46 years. (He died because of cancer.) I haven’t written about this loss because it’s too raw. Even today, talking to Tom, I started crying. I know how deeply his absence is felt by everyone who loved him in his family and community, and two people dear to me in particular, his sister Carreme and mutual friend to us all, Debbie.

Because of the Internet, I was able to watch his funeral mass even though I couldn’t be there. That meant so much to me, and the eulogies given for him resonated because they spoke of his character and of how special he was to those who knew him best. His younger brother specifically mentioned Joe’s love for Bob Dylan’s music, and he referenced in particular the song “Boots of Spanish Leather,” a dialogue between two people experiencing a separation that is…forever.

From Joe’s obituary: “He spent his life fighting for anyone who needed to be fought for. So many of us needed him to fill some void, be it father, lawyer, justice and he filled those gaps in our lives, our society, for as long as he could. The best service we could do in [his] memory… is to live our lives in pursuit of faith, justice, and equality and try to fill the gaps as best we can.”

Joe, thank you for every interaction of those forty-six years. For every shared correspondence. For everything you taught me and we learned together and apart on this journey. You were an extraordinary friend, son, brother, uncle, husband, godfather, father, grandfather, and human being. You are woven into a tapestry with all the threads that connect us and Bob Dylan.

The same thing I would want today,
I would want again tomorrow…

Some more thoughts

Talking to Marika the other night and I told her about something that happened long ago. I have a cowbell that came from a night of jamming at my boyfriend’s house with him, Riley, and others.

“Good memory,” she said.

It is a good memory. Today I pulled out the cowbell for a silly iPhone photo on Instagram (cows were involved), but then I shot this photo with my D3400.


The cowbell, my drumsticks, my tambourine. A lot of fun there (and no, I don’t play the drums) and definitely good memories.

I think about music a lot. I think of all the families I know who put their kids in weekend and after-school classes to learn everything: martial arts, dance, gymnastics, tennis, languages, piano, voice, painting…

I speak now in defense of public schools, because I am passionate about keeping education free and available to all. I was once a public school student. I come from a family of teachers. I was educated to teach in public schools. I think one of the worse trends in education was to begin teaching toward standardized tests and focus on academics only (and trust me, I FERVENTLY WISH TODAY’S SCHOOL SCIENCE CLASSES WERE ANYWHERE NEAR AS GOOD AS THEY USED TO BE). In some school systems, they are. But not all.

Cutting the arts… Not every family can afford to feed their kids, much less pay for private lessons to develop their skills and interests. Even the poorest schools still have sports, and athletics have been a way into acceptance and out of poverty for some kids. But not all kids are interested in sports or good at sports.

I know what music, theater, art, and dance meant to many of my friends. Our schools need these activities that give children and teens a place to grow and develop. To find their hidden talents. To be part of something and be good at something. These things make better children, better schools, better adults, better citizens. I believe this to the bottom of my soul.

People talk about how the Internet offers children everything. Maybe. Maybe it can be more than a diversion or passive entertainment. But that’s only if you have access to it on your timeframe and not just during school and library hours.

Funny, those same people also say kids these days just seem so mean. I love teenagers; I always have. Even when they aren’t related to me. I’ve seen what makes a mean teenager–an eighth grader with a bad attitude is a challenge like no other. But I’ve seen how many teenagers were drawn away from a system that can make them mean by providing them access to the arts and an opportunity to develop a sense of their own self-worth.

The arts are for all kids. In school. Not just affluent kids. Outside school.

I hear ya, buddy


A few days back I relocated and reorganized my essential oils cabinet. I put photos of that process on Instagram, and I was trying to remember if I ever posted the finished project here. I had no idea. As I searched my mental file cabinet, a line from one of my late friend Riley’s poems popped into my head: My mind is a jumble.

Need to find that poem and see what he’s trying to remind me of.