You Can't Go Home Again

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Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again, and I tend to agree. If you could, indeed, "go home," where exactly would that be? Would it be a particular point in time, or a place in the past that no longer exists? Perhaps it is a place you haven't been to yet? Perhaps it never was, except in your imagination?

What defines "home" for you? ~~GH

[Tomorrow: The Soul is A Stranger]

Something Strange About You

“There's something strange about you. And it is this that you

 must protect from all the world's normalizing forces.” 

           ~~ Teju Cole

[Tomorrow: You Can't Go Home Again]

I Will be Waiting

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I will be waiting here

For your Silence to break

For your Soul to shake

For your Love to wake.

  ~~ Rumi

[Tomorrow: Something Strange About You]

What A Goddess Is

by Rafael Espitia Perea
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"A goddess is a woman who emerges from deep within herself. She is a woman who has honestly explored her darkness and learned to celebrate her light. She is a woman who is able to fall in love with the magnificent possibilities within her. She is a woman who knows of the magic and mysterious places inside her, the sacred places that can nurture her soul and make her whole. She is a woman who radiates light. She is magnetic. She walks into a room and male and female alike feel her presence. 

She has power and softness at the same time. She has powerful sexual energy that’s not dependent on physical looks. She has a body that she adores and it shows by the way she comfortably lives and moves in it. She cherishes beauty, light and love. She is a mother to all children. She flows with life in effortless grace. She can heal with a look or a touch of the hand. She is fiercely sensual and fearlessly erotic and engages in sex as her way to share with another in touching the divine. 

She is compassion and wisdom. She is seeker of Truth and cares deeply about something bigger than herself. She is a woman who knows that her purpose in life is to reach higher and rule with love. She is woman in love with love. She knows that joy is her destiny and by embracing it and sharing it with others, wounds are healed. 

She is a woman who has come to know that her partner is as tender, lost, and frightened as she has been at times. She has come to understand the scars of the boy in him and knows that together, love can be the relief, the healing of their wounds. She is a woman who can accept herself as she is. She can accept another as they are. She is able to forgive her mistakes and not feel threatened by another’s even when attacked. 

She is a woman who can ask for help when she needs it or give help when asked. She respects boundaries, hers and another’s. She can see God in another’s eyes. She can see God in her own. She can see God in every life situation. She is woman who takes responsibility for everything she creates in her life. She is a woman who is totally supportive and giving. She is a Goddess…"
~~Sadly, the only attribution I can find for this amazing essay is Anonymous

[Tomorrow: I Will Be Waiting]

The Night Was Peppered with Stars

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"She looked out, and the night was peppered with stars. 

They were crowding round the house, as if curious to see 

what was to take place there, but she did not notice this, 

nor that one or two of the smaller ones winked at her."

~~ "Peter Pan" by J. M. Barrie

[Tomorrow: What a Goddess Is]

Baptist Preacher, Part Three

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Part Three, continued from Part Two. To read the beginning of this story, click here for Part One.

Now before you judge, for all I knew Rob had been sandbagging me as well. He hadn’t, and I knew he hadn’t, but my father taught me to size up my opponent rather than go all-out from the beginning.

Rob played well, very well in fact, but he was off-balance and ill-prepared for my style that first day. I ran him ragged – left, right, left, right, till he anticipated a shift to the left and I hit a sudden right with an outside spin. I massacred him.

We were both drenched in perspiration and parched by the time he eventually relented. We had played first best of three, then best of five. I don’t recall the scores, but I didn’t skunk him. He played well; I just bested him that day. Funny thing about me is, it’s not important that I continue to beat someone. I just like knowing I did it once. I have no further need to prove anything after that, generally speaking.

Rob offered to treat me to lunch at Wendy’s, which at the time was new in our area and I’d never eaten there, and afterward we would go swimming. I always kept a swim suit in my car back then during the summer, because I loved to swim.

Once we waited out the long lunch line in Wendy’s and reached the counter, I realized I hadn’t paid attention to the menu and had no clue what was available. As I scanned the board, the counter girl asked Rob for his order.

“Two triple cheeseburgers with everything; two large fries; two large Cokes; and two Frosties,” he said, voice booming in that deep baritone he had.

I was offended. How dare he presume to order for me? Who died and made him king?  What made him think he knew me well enough to decide I wanted “everything” on my sandwich – or that I even liked cheese? And what the hell was a Frosty anyway?

Then he turned to me and said, “What would you like?”

Yes, this man actually ordered, and consumed, all of that food. And he did that each and every time we ate at Wendy’s as long as we dated. 

Rob Truman had a big appetite.

Baptist Preacher, Part Two

This is Part Two of a serial story. To read Part One, click here.

On Monday morning, the city was holding lessons where we agreed to meet, so we drove across town to Kanawha City public courts.

The competitive spirit established at the hospital continued on the court. Rob cut me no slack; he served hard, played aggressive and well. I sized him up and feigned a weak backhand to throw him off.

I had a great backhand. In fact, I was fairly evenly strong on both sides. My knees weren’t destroyed yet; I was nimble and fast. I had a decent serve and could deal either a top spin or a wicked back spin pretty much at will. At that time, at least where I played, most people did not usually execute spins.

Of course, I wore a tennis skirt. Back then, you had to have proper clothing in order to get on the court. The dress I chose that day was a buttercup yellow one-piece dress, fitted perfectly against my hourglass figure and just barely covering the bottom of my [panties]. It was sleeveless, and the straps were thick braided matching material. My skin was bronze and my hair -- down past my waist -- chestnut brown with brilliant natural new-penny-copper highlights from the hours I spent in the sun.

When you’ve played tennis for years, you learn a few different ways to retrieve balls rather than bend over a hundred times. Some people double-tap the ball with their racket, causing the ball to bounce up into the air so it can be grabbed. Some scoop the edge of the racket under the ball and flip it up. This is hard on the racket because it’s so easy to scrape it on the hard surface. There is another technique, where you use your racket to roll the ball up the outside of your ankle until it’s high enough that you can tap it with your racket, causing the ball to bounce up to waist level where you can easily grab it.

But if you’re a girl and you want to be really mean, you position yourself in such a way that you bend from the waist, keeping your legs very straight. You angle yourself just so, and retrieve the ball just fast enough that your skirt flips just a bit, revealing snow-white panties against tan thighs for just a split second. Then you turn and make eye contact with your opponent, hold that eye contact, and tuck the ball up under the side of your skirt inside the elastic of your panties (if you don’t have pockets – which I didn’t).

Psychological warfare? Why not? Males are considerably stronger than females – it’s only prudent to make the playing field as level as possible.

I could see that I had accomplished what I set out to do. Rob was a red-blooded twenty-something male. It was time for the sandbagging to end.

[Tomorrow: Part Three]

The Baptist Preacher, Part One

A Baptist preacher fell in love with me when I was nineteen, and carries a torch for me to this day.~~GH

I worked on 3-North at Charleston Memorial Hospital. That unit was practically intensive care; it was Dr. James Walker’s personal floor. Thirty-two beds – four beds in each ward, eight wards on the unit compromised 3-North. Dr. Walker had his own rules, one of which was no visiting hours except Sunday afternoons from 1-8:30 p.m.

Since our patients were very ill, many if not all of them were on respirators or ventilators, you can imagine the influx of visitors on Sundays. There was no limit to how many visitors a patient could have, either, so it wasn’t unusual for four to six visitors to crowd around each bed. Four patients per room, plus let’s call it an average of five people per bed – that’s twenty-four people crammed into a fairly small space.

With twenty-four-plus human beings talking in various tones, a variety of whoosh-making breathing equipment, electronic IV machines tick-tick-ticking, and the general ambient noise of that many people moving about bumping into things, the rooms were quite chaotic. So when this bigger-than-life barrel-chested six-four guy shows up in tennis whites carrying a racquet and begins practically shouting out greetings, you can understand that I was not amused as I attempted to listen to a patient’s breath sounds with my stethoscope.

I asked him to kindly tone it down a bit, and I didn’t catch what he said, but whatever it was caused a ripple of titters in the crowd around the patient he was visiting. He seemed arrogant and something about his attitude challenged something in me. I continued checking my patients’ vital signs and inspecting their equipment to make sure everything operated properly. This big tennis guy kept making jokes and regaling his audience with stories about the game he’d just come from. I had played competitive tennis since I was seven years old, and his boasts got under my skin. I became more and more annoyed just listening to him.

He had an unusual oratory style; the people seemed to hang on his every word. I found that interesting, if irritating. At the time, I’d never been in a Baptist or other fundamentalist church. I had been raised Presbyterian and our services were low key and understated.

Eventually, I got my chance to pipe up. He made some comment about skinning both his elbows playing tennis.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

He answered me.

I murmured something unintelligible under my breath, nodded my head, then turned away and busied myself with my patient.

He took the bait. “Why did you want to know where I’m from?”

I turned back, paused a beat, and said, “Because where I’m from, we don’t play tennis on our elbows.”

Twenty-some people burst out laughing. A few even hooted and jeered. The big tennis man’s face turned crimson, his ears practically glowed they were so red.

And so it began.

[Tomorrow: Part 2]

Tommy Watts - Part III (Conclusion)

This is the conclusion, Part III, of a longer story. Go back two posts for Part I if you'd like to read the entire series. If you just need to read Part II, click here. I hope you enjoy the story. Feel free to leave a comment. ~~GH

There were classes I wanted to take during the school year that my parents wouldn’t agree to, but if I really wanted, I could enroll for them during summer school. I really, really wanted to take them, so I went to summer school every summer until graduation. As a result, instead of the 17.5 credit hours necessary to graduate, I ended up earning 25.

Although I feel sure my parents believed they did the right thing by forcing me to take summer classes for my electives, what they didn’t realize was the influence and the type of students I associated with at summer school. I would never have been exposed to the drugs and alternative lifestyles had I not attended summer school. I spent that summer hanging out on the front steps of Watts Elementary with a group of new friends that I met at summer school.

We smoked pot and talked about life, school, each other. The older guys raced motorcycles from one end of Costello to the other, always heading west toward Watts Street. The street was narrow, two lanes only, and one was always filled with parked cars so in actuality there was only the one open lane. It was suicidal, really, to hit the speeds these guys hit each and every time. Can you guess how fast they went? It wasn’t unusual for them to top 100 mph. If a car had turned onto Costello from Watts, someone would have been killed.

There were swing sets on the campus, but the Board of Education took the swings down when school let out, and there was nothing for kids to do. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, as they say, and we kept busy breaking out windows by throwing rocks. It wasn’t random vandalism. Not at all. We carefully chose, identified, made sure everyone knew exactly which window was to be broken, and then we took turns lobbing rocks from the playground until someone shattered the glass.

Nearby beside a graveyard down on Beech Avenue was a house of students – guys from Thailand who went to Morris Harvey, a private college in town. They always had the best hash and pot. The inside of the house was a living Black Sabbath poster. It was dark, the only illumination black lights. Neon colored black velvet art posters decorated the walls. Music blared from the open windows and wafted up the street at least a block in every direction. When we ran out of pot, a couple of us girls would sashay down to the Thai guys’ house and bum some. They were always generous with us as long as we sat and got high with them for a little while.

That summer, Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” played on the radio, and I didn’t understand what it meant. Tommy explained that the guy in the song dressed up as a woman. I’d never heard of that before, except in Vaudeville acts. He explained this was not like that, but didn’t go into detail. I had no idea what it meant to lose your head while you were giving head, or any of the sexual references whatsoever. Tommy did explain what “Valium would have helped that batch” meant. Sometimes whoever “cooked” the mix added Valium to a batch of speed in order to help with the sudden drop in energy as the drug began to wear off. Drugs, I was coming to understand pretty well, even though my experience was limited to smoking pot or hash.

So the group of teens hung out in front of the school all day that summer, listening to someone’s hand-held transistor radio, talking, sometimes throwing rocks, watching the motorcycle races, generally being bored and hot but it beat sitting at home. This was a new world for me, who’d always been an Upstanding Model Citizen – this world of vandalism and pot smoking, knowing the secret meanings of “then he was a she” and the other code language of rock songs.

One day, someone said it was Tommy’s birthday. I was surprised; I hadn’t known. I asked him about it, and he assured me it wasn’t true. I didn’t believe him. Come to find out years later, his birthday was the end of October so he had told me the truth. But at the time, I thought that day was his birthday, and since I had no money and nothing to give him, I decided I would surprise him later on by hiding in one of the guys’ vans and jumping out to wish him happy birthday. I was pleased with myself to think of it.

So later that afternoon, Tommy sat on the sidewalk and strapped on ankle weights before going someplace for a while. I slipped into the van behind a homemade curtain that separated the front seat from the cargo section, and hid. The driver didn’t know I was there, and neither did Tommy.

Tommy hopped up into the van and away we went. The driver careened at top speed around the hill. I sensed the hard ninety-degree turn onto Watts, then the sharp left onto Price Street. We plummeted down Price past Taylor’s Grocery and I was slung against the side of the van as we turned left on Greendale. It was like riding a roller coaster blindfolded. I loved every minute.

The driver and Tommy made small talk for a few minutes then the conversation turned chilling. He asked where Tommy wanted dropped off, and Tommy said to leave him out at a girl’s house we went to school with. They both laughed in a way that made me feel uncomfortable.

“Is she gonna give you your birthday present?” the driver leered.

“She sure is,” Tommy replied.

 The conversation got worse, more graphic, and I had to hold my hands over my mouth to keep from shouting out how angry I was. I was also embarrassed, and hurt, and wished I could just disappear. I could hardly believe my ears, that my sweet boyfriend who never ever stepped out of line, who always respected me and treated me like a queen, could be so disrespectful and think much less speak out loud the words he used to describe this girl and what he planned to do with her.

There was a tiny crack at the top of the curtain, and when the van stopped at a traffic light on Washington Street, I realized it would be stationary for a few moments. I opened the door, jumped out, and ran as fast as I could away from the vehicle. It took the guys a minute to realize what had happened, and by the time it sank in, the light had changed. Drivers in the cars behind the van honked their horns, and the van pulled away.

I ran all the way up the hill till I was almost home. I ended up stopping at my friend Fred’s house, and he immediately invited me inside his basement when he saw my red swollen eyes and face. Fred held me while I cried, and we listened to Elton John’s “Madman Across the Water” album until I eventually drifted off into a troubled sleep.

I never spoke to Tommy Watts again. I can’t remember but I feel sure he called me – he may have even come to my house to try and make amends – but I would have no part of it. Some damage is repairable; some is not. For me, where I was at that point in time, I could no more have forgiven him – or understood – than I could have flown to the moon.

Tommy Watts died at age 47, as I understand it, of a sudden stroke. Rest in peace, Tommy. I do forgive you. I’m not even sure you ever did anything wrong to me, really. So it goes.~~GH

[Tomorrow: The Baptist Preacher, Part One]

Tommy Watts - Part II

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[Continued from yesterday. To read the first part, click here].

I’d somehow finagled the right to check tickets at the door of prom, and so I got to wear a formal gown for the first time. Mine was sleeveless, with an empire waist that fit snugly under my breasts and flowed freely from that level down. The lower section was a fairly bright lemon yellow, and the upper part was white. There was a gathered ruffle, white trimmed with yellow edging, that ran down the middle of the front of the dress.

My left upper arm was easily twice as large as my right arm due to an allergic reaction to a tetanus shot I’d taken the night before after falling into a sewer before a softball game. Not only was it swollen, it had turned a bright, angry red as well. So between the deep tan I had from playing tennis and softball outdoors every day, and the tetanus shot reaction glowing crimson against the pristine white of my prom gown, I stood out.

Tommy could have attended prom with me for free – admission for two was one of the perks I earned – but he wanted no part of such things, and I agreed to his alternative plan. We would walk from the Civic Center to Shoney’s Colonial on the Boulevard, and have a milkshake and spend some time together talking.

He showed up in neat blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and blue jean jacket. I thought he looked like a million bucks. We strolled hand-in-hand the couple of blocks to Shoney’s. Because it was a Saturday night, the place was packed with a waiting line that snaked out the front doors and around part of the building. It was like that every weekend night if there was a concert, or a prom or other activity, or even if there wasn’t; Shoney’s was a destination in itself back then.

I expressed concern we would have to wait for hours and suggested we just go home. Tommy wouldn’t hear of it. He led me by my hand and we wove through the crowd until we reached the hostess. Tommy leaned forward and took her hand. He bent down and whispered in her ear, and she giggle and blushed, then looked down at her hand. Her jaw relaxed a little, the smile gone, and she stared into the palm of her hand. Immediately, her hand clamped shut, and she looked up at Tommy who by then had moved us away from the hostess

Pretty as you please, she called out “Watts, party of two?”

I opened my mouth to ask how, and Tommy shushed me. He tugged my arm so hard I nearly lost my balance, and before I knew it, we had been seated in a booth – a booth!  When there was just the two of us in that crowded Saturday night restaurant – near the back of the dining room.

We ordered a single chocolate milkshake and chatted about my adventure the night before. Tommy was so sweet and encouraging. He made me feel as if it hadn’t been the end of the world, and by the time our treat arrived, I had forgotten about my sore arm and wounded pride. We shared the milkshake, sucking up the thick chocolate ice cream through two straws like Archie and Betty at the Chok’lit Shoppe.

We continued chatting after we finished the shake, and Tommy began to fold a five-dollar bill into intricate shapes. It seemed random to me, sort of an absent-minded activity to occupy his hands, and I assumed he was curtailing his boundless energy in order to be able to sit still.

Finally, we decided it was time to leave and let someone else have our booth. Tommy called our waitress over. He rolled what seemed to be a die across the table. It was the five-dollar bill, folded into a perfect cube shape with the “5” on one face. “This is for you. That was one tasty milkshake you made; thank you,” he said and smiled. She beamed from the wide grin that spread across her face.

He and I strolled hand-in-hand the mile and a half to my house. Although he kissed me very sweetly – reverently but passionately as well – his hands never wandered off the hardtop. There was no surreptitious brushing of the back of his knuckles, or nudging of a breast, no accidental butt touch, nothing. Tommy respected my boundaries without exception. I loved Tommy Watts and although he wasn’t the white collar upstanding citizen my parents wanted me to end up married to, he seemed to be the perfect boy as far as I was concerned. He was smart, funny, clever, kind, talented, entertaining, and he respected me in a way I was unaccustomed to.

Everything was fine until the day that summer I decided to hide and surprise him. ~~GH

[Tomorrow: Conclusion]

Tommy Watts - Part I

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I was almost fifteen when I fell in love with Tommy Watts. He wasn’t much taller than me and usually I was attracted to taller guys, but his personality shone so brightly that I couldn’t help but be fascinated. He had strawberry blonde hair and a mustache, and facial skin so red he always looked as if he’d just ducked out of the grip of some mother hell-bent on scrubbing an invisible spot of dirt from his cheeks. And his eyes! Tommy Watts had eyes the color of cornflowers.

He was muscular in the way that not-so-tall men have – that Irish fisticuffs champion physique. I used to picture him in waist-pants and leather lace-up boots with a wide belt, his arms curled, fists balled, ready to box like pictures I’d seen of men from the late 19^th century. Tommy was always ready for come-what-may. He might not have been the biggest guy out there, but a girl knew she was in good hands when she was with Tommy Watts.

He was as athletic as a monkey. There was nothing I knew of that Tommy Watts couldn’t do with his body. He could jump into the air and twist around three complete revolutions before he landed facing you. He could do handstands, backflips, handstands that turned into backflips, backflips that turned into handstands. He could stand on his head. He could backflip and land standing on his head. The fact that he ended up making his living scrambling around in trees as a forester speaks to his athleticism. 

One of my favorite feats of gymnastics involved him flipping onto the roof that covered the back doors to the alley at my high school. But he did it with flare! He faced out into the alley, back turned toward the building’s wall. He’d jump up and grab onto the roof’s edge as if he were going to do a chin-up. Then he slowly extended his legs out, body straight and stiff as a board, until he was perpendicular to the roof. Magically, he’d keep his body perfectly straight and continue completing the arc until he was upside-down, face down, legs pointed to the sky. Then he would speed up and finish off the pendulum swing by landing on the roof on his feet. I once saw him accomplish this routine with a cast on his right arm. Yes, somehow he did it one-armed.

Tommy Watts had deadly aim with a rock. He would take fifty-cent bets that he could hit a specific window in a building with a rock. He never once had to pay off in all the time we spent together. The summer of 1972, he broke out every single pane of glass on the Costello Street side of Watts Elementary School (no relation), one fifty-cent bet at a time. That’s a tidy sum.

I will share my best, and worst, memories of Tommy with you. The best involves the day after I fell in a sewer. The worst involves the day I decided to hide and surprise him. ~~GH

[Tomorrow: Tommy Watts, Part II]

Crapalachia: My Very First Book Review

Crapalachia: A Biography of Place by Scott McClanahan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

McClanahan wrote about people I've known and loved, and love, and remember, and misremember, and sometimes want to forget. He pretended to be rock solid hard-ass Appalachian/West Virginian, then shape-shifted in that magic way of the Scot-Irishman and became liquid, seeped into my soul and washed loose all the debris that had settled there -- was resting quite nicely, in fact -- and stirred up all that sediment and made me laugh and cry and nod my head in agreement and want a drink even though I don't drink any more.

Reading this book was like reading a love letter someone had written to me, someone I never knew loved me, someone I never knew, someone who knew me better than I knew myself.

The appendix is a lovely disclaimer/exclaimer/explainer, and I thank and applaud Scott for including it.

Quote: "I just realized that I never look at a painting and ask, 'Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?' It's just a painting."

"Crapalachia" is just a book. And a fine one, at that. Five stars.
~~Ginger Hamilton


View all my reviews

[Tomorrow: Tommy Watts - Part I]

I Usta

When I was ten years old, I received a hand-written-in-pencil letter from my great grandmother thanking me for sending her a dollar for her 80th birthday. It was a pretty long letter -- two pages, front and back -- full of laboriously looped and neatly crafted cursive writing.

One line that stuck out and caught my critical third-grade, so-holier-than-thou eye was "when i was a girl, i usta love school." She didn't capitalized the pronoun "I," but what struck me was the made-up word "usta."

For years, I used it (pardon the pun) as a joke: "I usta love school," "I usta --" whatever. The irony of it spoke to me. She usta (again, forgive) *love* school but couldn't spell "used to." I was so cruel, so unkind, so self-sanctimonious, so unforgiving of a woman who had only three years of schooling, lived in a nursing home, didn't really know me except as some far-distant spawn of the spawn of her son, and yet she invested so much time and effort into reaching out and trying to formulate a connection with me.

I usta think I was something special. Now I know I'm not. I hope you will forgive my insensitivity. Thank you, Grandma Hopcroft. 

[Tomorrow: Crapalachia - My Very First Book Review]

Earth Delights

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This is one of my favorite lines from Gibran's body of work. How wonderful to personify Nature and know she loves you so? ~~GH

[Tomorrow: I Usta]

Ye Are Many

Rise, like lions after slumber,

In unvanquishable number,

Shake the chains to earth like dew,

Which in sleep had fallen on you —

Ye are many — they are few.

~~Percy Bysshe Shelley 

"The Masque of Anarchy," 1819

[Tomorrow: I Usta]

Sometimes I Do

In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art."
  ~~Rumi

[Tomorrow: Ye Are Many]

Alan Watts: Cats

"A cat sits alone until it is done sitting, and then gets up, 

stretches, and walks away." ~~ Alan Watts


[Tomorrow: Sometimes I Do]

Give Freely

Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself.
   ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
         (1803-1882)

[Tomorrow: ]

Mirage of Homage

I'm pretty sure I can't take reading one more collection of words some man has written about his devotion for the woman he loves. Usually, I well up with mudita, but tonight I feel very delicate and tender, raw. I am maybe even a little envious (although envy is fairly foreign to me).

My memory echoes with words which were whispered and even shouted to me, words that I know are now whispered and shouted to another. And I wonder why I'm so far past that section of road now, so far I can't even remember what they sounded like.

I wonder if that place was like the shimmery illusion one sees during summer when the heat rises off the asphalt and everything seems magical for just a moment. Were those words even spoken? If I went back to that spot in time, would I hear them, disembodied, repeating like a scratched record, over and over? ~~GH

[Tomorrow: Give Freely]

Lose Yourself

Whatever happens, just keep smiling and lose yourself in Love. 

        ~~Rumi

[Tomorrow: Mirage of Homage]

Terribly Real

[Tomorrow: Lose Yourself]

On the Other Side

On the Other Side

Imagine a beautiful vine

Climbing a high stone wall.

The vine finds a sunny space

and towards the light, gives its all.

After passing through the crevice,

Its bloom it seems to hide.

But in reality it's thriving

There on the other side.

And when I think of loved ones

Who have left this mortal plane,

I remember the vine on the stone wall

And know that they're the same.

~~Ginger Hamilton

[Tomorrow:  Terribly Real]

Chain of Fools

I'm sharing this just because it is so absurd and unexpected. Enjoy. ~~GH

[Tomorrow: On the Other Side]

This is Not for You

I am so fortunate to be acquainted with many, many talented people. Although I love them all, some are more special to me than others. One such is my good friend Mick Craig. He is multi-talented, and a fine human being besides.

Here is a poem he wrote that made me cry. Not weep, mind you -- cry. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. If you do, check out his blog, A Short Story in 365 Chapters. ~~GH

This is not for you

Don't believe that you were the love of my life
From the first time I kissed you until the day I died

Don't believe that I would have waited all night in the rain for a glimpse of you,
And turned my back on all who love me for one last kiss

Don't believe that after all this time, I still wake in the night
And smell your hair and taste you on my tongue

Don't believe that when I kissed your sleeping lips and woke you
I knew that I was home

Don't believe that I would forgive you anything, give you everything,
Never leave you, betray you or ever make you cry

Don't believe that I would have picked you up again
No matter how often you fell

Don't believe that your eyes made my heart sing
And that now I have no music left

Don't believe that you gave me my greatest joy and my worst despair
And that I lived my life in those few short months with you

Don't believe, though all of it is true
Cross my broken heart.

     ~~Mick Craig

[Tomorrow: Chain of Fools]