Tag: riley

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.

All Hallows’ Eve

I hope you and yours have a safe and happy holiday, however you celebrate. It’s raining here (which we GREATLY need; Houston is under a drought), so even if we were giving out candy (we’re not), I doubt there’ll be many children trick or treating. Behind the cut, I’m sharing the last days of my skeleton photos posted to Instagram. Y’all get a lot more details here than I provide on my Instagram posts. I had a little help today thanks to posters from the coloring book pictured above. It’s always a party if there’s music!

Continue reading “All Hallows’ Eve”

Song Challenge: Day 29

Riley, December 1980

Today’s song challenge is “a song someone sang to you once.” How about sang to me too many times to count? If I was in a bad mood or just feeling playful, and Riley was there with his guitar, I made the same request: “Play ‘Rocky Raccoon,’ please!” I’ve shared on here before how one time when I made that request, he gave me a reproachful look.

If I’ve never shared this before, it’s a picture from one of our high school yearbooks. I don’t have that yearbook, but Lynne does. I snapped a photo with my camera phone when I was at Half-Acre Wood a couple of years ago. Riley in his 1950s era raccoon coat.

Riley and other musicians were doing a tribute in a local bar to John Lennon in December 1980, days after the former Beatle was murdered. As much as everyone there loved playing and hearing the music, there was such a pervasive feeling of sadness among us. I couldn’t take it anymore and mouthed my request: “Rocky Raccoon.”

“That’s a McCartney song,” he answered off mic, not wanting to embarrass me.

“I know,” I said. “Please play it anyway. For me.”

He couldn’t refuse me. I don’t know about anyone else in the bar, but hearing Riley play and sing a song that always made me laugh was what I needed to keep my equilibrium that night. Whether or not John Lennon liked the song, as he once told us in a different song, Whatever gets you thru the night/It’s all right, it’s all right.

I thank Riley, always, for all the days and nights he got me through with his music and poetry, all the other artists’ music he introduced me to, his friendship and love, for sometimes testing me almost to the ends of my patience and endurance, his emotional support during my hardest times, and his ability to make me laugh.

In 2022, on the 42nd anniversary of John Lennon’s death, a group of musicians and fans gathered at the Strawberry Fields/Imagine memorial in Central Park, and there’s a video of them doing the song. I guess I’m not the only one. =)

Here’s the album version by the Beatles.

Song Challenge: Day 27

Today’s song challenge is “a song that breaks your heart.” For me, that song is the Carole King composition “You’ve Got a Friend.” I own it by at least three artists, and I no longer listen to it. There’s nothing at all wrong with the song; it’s as beautiful to me as it ever was. But a moment came in my life when hearing “You’ve Got a Friend” evoked a lyric from a different song, the Jackson Browne composition “These Days”: Please don’t confront me with my failures/I had not forgotten them.

I’m not linking to either song. I had a great birthday yesterday, and today I’d like to pick up where I was in my manuscript. I don’t want to be derailed by melancholy.

On a lighter note, in February, I received “The Beatles Coloring Book” from Nurse Lisa in Iowa. Below are a series of photos showing the evolution of the first picture I colored from it and finally finished this week (working on it sporadically for the last five-plus weeks).


The cover of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album.


The cover of the coloring book Lisa sent.


My first coloring included the title and the Volkswagen.


Finished page!


Framed and hanging on the wall in the writing sanctuary, a little birthday gift to myself yesterday.

When I wrote A Coventry Wedding, I scattered Easter eggs (an “Easter egg” is defined as “a little extra something that authors hide in their books for readers to find”) throughout the book. In A Coventry Wedding, the Easter eggs were allusions to Beatles’ lyrics meant as gifts for Riley to find when he read the novel. Sadly, Riley died before the book’s release, five months before my mother died in 2008. The novel came out later than scheduled because the editor gave me an extension so I could focus on Mother during her final months while I was also grieving Riley’s loss. It doesn’t require a therapist to recognize that I haven’t tried to get another full-length work of fiction published since 2009 or that it took me ten years to even begin writing novels again.

Some of the Easter eggs in A Coventry Wedding alluded to songs on Abbey Road. Off the top of my head, those include “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window” and “Mean Mr. Mustard.” From that album, here’s my deliberately-chosen song “Carry That Weight” (in which the Beatles sample another song from Abbey Road, “You Never Give Me Your Money”). All kinds of writers have a little fun with their work sometimes. In fact, I’ve just written a scene with a character analyzing Easter eggs in a screenwriter’s music video.

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.)

Mood: Monday and Song Challenge: Day 4

Photo of painting previously posted here was of Morning Guitar Painting, oil on canvas, date unknown, by artist Elaine Fleck.

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.”

all things must pass

George Harrison died on November 29, 2001. Today, I’ve chosen to listen to all of his songs from my CD version of his 1970 album All Things Must Pass. The three-disk album Riley gave me all those years ago when it was released was drowned in our Harvey flood; I replaced it quickly because not to have this collection from my “favorite” Beatle was unthinkable.

I got the 50th Anniversary vinyl when it was released in 2021, and I’ve never removed its shrink wrap. For some reason, I want it to remain intact. Maybe I’m sure that one day, a copy of the original will come back into my life. I don’t know. Whatever format it’s in, these remain some of the most meaningful, sometimes haunting, songs of my life.

I have the CD version of the 50th Anniversary recordings, too.

I miss George Harrison. I miss Riley.

Now and then

Love the newly released Beatles song and video “Now and Then” as well as the video of how it came to be made partially thanks to new technology that Peter Jackson worked with when he updated the Let It Be movie with his The Beatles: Get Back film. Tom was kind enough to watch that with me last year (has it been that long?), putting up with my bouts of tears and occasional commentary during, as well as prolonged reminiscing afterward.

It’s been fun sharing online comments about the new song with a few people who are either musicians or love music, in general, and love the Beatles in particular. The Beatles weren’t around for my whole life, but I was around for their many incarnations. It’s truly a gift from those Liverpool lads to have them visually and musically provide the world another song. We can thank Yoko for sharing the tapes for the two songs with all four Beatles released in the 1990s, then to her and Peter Jackson for this third one.

Good job, Paul and Ringo and, posthumously, John and George. Beatles4ever still sounds true–and the love you made is still felt around the world.