Tag: riley

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


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.”

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.

Hump Day


Last weekend, one of my industrious activities was altering the sleeves on a couple of shirts. In the process, I ran out of thread on a spool. It’s been YEARS since that happened. Those are my bifocals pictured with the sewing stuff. Since the surgery, they’ve actually been useful to me for the first time since I got that prescription…last July. Progress.

I didn’t get enough sleep last night. I tried to take a nap after meds and breakfast and eye drops and all the things. Nap wasn’t happening. So I kicked into gear and started doing things that I had no idea I intended to do.


First, I began to gather things for donation. These were my first items–some pristine stuffed animals, Houston Rockets souvenirs, lots and lots of throw pillows (none that were sewn for me, but including four I once sewed for myself), a couple of gently used quilted bedspreads and pillow shams, other bed linens, a beautiful shower curtain we haven’t used for years, some clothing, and all my old VHS tapes (if those Disney movies are worth something, then I hope someone with more energy than I have grabs them from one of the Goodwill stores and eBays the crap out of them). I’m sure there was more, because by the time I had it all gathered for Tom to load in the car after work, both dining tables were covered. The items have been donated!

We started a redo in the large guest bedroom (aka Lynne’s room), but it’ll be a few days before I can share photos because it’s a work in progress. Naturally, I failed to take before photos of anything, but I may have some old ones that’ll work.

I turned a brutal eye on the second guest room, or since 2020, the Writing Sanctuary (which at different times has been called the Butterfly Room, the Winnie the Pooh Room, and maybe the Quilt Room; I can’t keep up).

Here’s an example of how the bed can look in here when I’m full-on writing and otherwise multitasking. This is from mid-May.

That’s the collaged sketchbook I keep my completed coloring pages in, my wee CD player, the CD binder I’m STILL in (it’s like the freaking 1974 of CD binders), my day planner, Patti Smith’s book that I often use as a prompt when I’m writing in my day planner, the binder that I keep up with my bills in. So… that day, I was writing, listening to music, coloring, paying bills, and journaling. Behind it all, against the wall, is a little crate where I keep a bunch of the books I use for blogging ideas. Keep those books in the back of your mind while I move on.

I didn’t take a photo of the cabinet in here. The big box of CDs that won’t fit in binders was on it. A lot of medical stuff post-surgery. But other than all that extra stuff, the top part usually looked like this.

Some doll muses, a little bit of Dennis Wilson and Beach Boys stuff, Beatles-related stuff, and up top, a shadowbox with mementos of our late friend Steve and photos of him.

I was ready for some order and some change. Below, I’ll share a photo of the shadowbox (reminder: Winnie the Pooh and Piglet were our thing–on the top of the cabinet, not pictured here, there’s usually a stuffed version of both that Steve kept in the hospital with him, plus a Pooh bear Lynne made that I’d given to our late friend John). Those are now in a cabinet with the other stuffed animals because after I donated some, I had room for them. It’ll be better to keep them dust-free.


The shadowbox has been this way since… 1992? ’93? Shiny fabric lining the back was wrapped around the amethyst crystal hanging in there (upper right), a gift from Steve to me one Christmas, put together by one of his RNs, Billie, from a metaphysical shop she owned, and secured into a bag tied with gold cord that I don’t think is visible in this photo. It also contained a dried rose that’s hanging in here toward the middle. Next to the amethyst crystal is a quartz crystal that Steve kept around his neck most of the time. A tiny mirror has fallen behind the Pooh scene I cut out of a greeting card. I never asked, but maybe there was a time before I met him when he and his friends did bumps off that mirror. It was the ’70s, it was the ’80s, and everyone was young and beautiful and life was a party until AIDS crashed it.

So now you need to remember those writing prompt books and this shadow box, while I show you this.


A lovely little pillow I bought sometime in the ’90s, cross-stitched with a scene featuring Winnie, Tigger, and Piglet. After the turn of the century, a young dog with a penchant for destroying linens and other fabric items chewed up part of this pillow. Could have been Margot; could have been Guinness. I well remember their team and individual exploits. Anyway, it’s been on top of that cabinet, too, and today I took it apart.


It became part of the redone shadowbox. Still contains the shiny fabric against the back, the two crystals, the dried rose, and now you can see the mirror. I also put Steve’s Armchair Conductor baton in there. He used to listen to classical music on one of my little boomboxes I took him and direct an imaginary orchestra with that baton in the hospital. Steve was a graduate student in music, a band director, and a conductor.


Beneath that is a picture that was also on the top shelf with Langston Hughes’s “Poem”:

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say
The poem ends,
Soft as it began–
I loved my friend.

Below that is a photo of Riley playing guitar. The poem was true of Steve in 1992. It became true of Riley in 2008.


So now there’s a corner, and on the other wall is the drawing I bought in 2010 from Gilbert Ruiz, a Houston artist, that makes me think of the novel I’ve yet to write about a ghost. The story contains elements of teenage Becky and includes characters inspired by My First Boyfriend and Riley, and borrows from a terrible thing that happened in our little Alabama town. That shadow box also contains strands of love beads from the ones Lynne and I strung all one summer.


Steve’s two 8×10 photos and a photo of Riley playing piano have joined the Family and Friends Gallery in the hall (of Houndstooth Hall).


I think you’re caught up to the redo of the little place where I had that mess of books. Now it’s just my various eReaders and the CD player I use for my playlist when I write. Tidier, right?


Those books moved to the top shelf that used to be all Steve stuff. They join some journals that had been on a tavern table in the dining room, my day planner, the Patti Smith book, my manifestation dude, sitting next to little herbal bags that were also from Steve and from Billie back in the day, and the “Sisters are forever” art given to me by Debby.

Next shelf down are more muses: Dennis Wilson, Beach Boys things, and four of my character dolls.

Bottom shelf are my Beatles things.

You have no idea what a mess those shelves were. Maybe now that my space feels so much clearer and uncluttered, my brain will follow suit and help me write again? When Lynne was here, she sat in this room as I read chapters aloud to her that she hadn’t previously read. She liked them. She said I NEED TO FINISH THE BOOK.