is there anybody going to listen to my story

Title is a Beatles lyric. Took my most recent coloring page (started last night; finished this morning) from this book. If I tell you the book’s one of my favorites, you’ll probably roll your eyes and think, They’re all your favorites, but it’s not true. There are a whole stack of coloring books I rarely open, so you see mostly coloring pages from my favorites. And I’ll offer again: come up with a coloring page theme or something you’d like to see colored, and I can probably find it on my shelf.

In 2016, I made a firm promise to myself. In 2020, I took a deep breath and repeated it. The paths my thoughts traveled as I colored the page below–thoughts that had zero to do with what I was coloring–have made me question whether I can make and keep that promise again. I don’t mean to sound all mysterious and certainly not ominous. I’m not making drastic changes in my life, only accepting a hard truth about something. I’m sure we all have to do that sometimes.

Here’s the coloring page. It doesn’t take up the whole page in my sketchbook, so I’ll probably end up coloring something smaller to go with it one day.

And here’s “Girl” by the Beatles from Rubber Soul that played its way through my ten million thoughts and resolutions while I colored. Man, I miss Riley.

ETA: The reason I chose that page to color was because it had earrings. This past summer, I made the decision to stop wearing earrings and let my piercings grow up. I first got my ears pierced at age sixteen by a friend–ice cube against the ear for numbing, sewing needle through the lobe into a slice of raw potato behind the ear–lots of alcohol and soap and water, leaving the little gold studs in for I don’t remember how long until everything was healed. I’d been absolutely forbidden to get my ears pierced. I did it when my mother was in New Jersey waiting on the birth of a grandchild. My father never noticed. I didn’t know the phrase then, but “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” =) My second piercings were a spur-of-the-moment agreement with Lynne in a Houston mall in, maybe, 1989? ’90? With one of those piercing guns. Hurt like the dickens. Anyway, I was tired of trying to find earrings I liked and could leave in all the time. I have a ton of beautiful earrings, mostly small studs, and probably not a single niece or grandniece, nephew or grandnephew, who’d want them.