Cal Armistead's Blog

Existential Angst, a Dog, and ‘The Now’

Yesterday, I said goodbye to my dog Layla. She was 15 years old, which I guess is over a hundred in people years. I’ll spare you the sad details. It’s not that kind of blog.

Instead, I’d like to revisit a blog I wrote back in January of 2015, titled, “How My Dog Rescued Me From Existential Angst.” Back then, nine years ago, I was dealing with both aging parents, and the thought of mortality was foremost in my mind in a way it had not fully been before. In 2020 I lost my Mom, so that has come to pass, and yesterday I lost Layla. Luckily for me, I still have my dad, hanging in there at almost 96 and a half.

But in the spirit of this blog, I’m hoping to gather to myself the appreciation of the now. I mean, not that my now feels all that terrific, (“a time to mourn”) but once I’ve got a handle on this, I plan to get back to the business of treasuring the precious ones I have.

Here’s that previous blog, from January 25, 2015, which I wrote while waiting impatiently to hear back from a publisher on a book:

I’ve been pondering some deep stuff these days. Like life, death, and the meaning of life. In fact, I think I’ll write about the night my dog Layla rescued me from a vortex of existential angst. Dogs and existentialism—how’s that for deep?

Here’s how it started, (although I’m not proud of it): with a glass of wine. I do not recommend this right before bed when one is already sad. It only makes you sadder and more susceptible to the vortex. But I’d been dealing with my mom and dad, who are both failing in big and small ways. They are old folks now, with a whole lot of sand in the bottom of the hourglass, and only a handful of grains left on top. It is a long, sad goodbye, and sometimes it can rip the heart out of my chest on a regular basis.

So anyway, back to the wine and the vortex. I was sitting on my bed with my hubby and Layla, my sweet 5-year-old miniature Australian shepherd. She is a sweet, smart girl with intelligent brown eyes that look into your soul, I tell you. This dog (despite the “miniature” thing—she’s a medium sized dog, about 30 pounds) has personality. She communicates. And she and I, we know each other. So there I was, sloshing wine on the bedspread and talking about my parents, feeling overwhelmed, and I started to cry. I couldn’t bear for one more moment, the knowledge that my parents are going to die, and that I will be witness to this enormous loss. How will I survive that unavoidable reality, I wondered? My husband tried to comfort me—something he is usually stellar at doing—but this time, I was inconsolable. I was dealing with death, with oblivion, with what the heck is this all about? How can we be expected to endure an existence where we lose everyone and everything precious to us? 

By this point, I was weeping and heartbroken over loss I hadn’t even been clobbered with yet, but know is coming. So as I wept and railed and felt there was nothing, nothing in this world that could comfort me or distract me from the agony of life and loss, Layla came up from her spot at the foot of the bed, planted herself in front of me, and stared at me. She forced her wet nose into my face and made me look at her, made me see her. This made me cry harder. Layla is my first dog ever you see, the only dog of my lifetime. 

“Someday you will die too, Layla,” I sobbed with renewed fervor. “My God, some day this beautiful little dog buddy of mine will die, and I will have to witness it. How will I ever, ever bear that?” 

Layla’s response was to lick my face and look deeper yet into my eyes. Those bright brown eyes seemed to say, “I know, Cal, I know. It’s sad and it hurts and it’s so very hard. It doesn’t seem fair, but hey, guess what, we’re here now. You’re here. I’m here. We are in this together and we have now. Now.” 

Then Layla licked me all over my face, licked up my tears and stuck her tongue up my nose until I had to laugh at this dog all up in my face, getting me slobbery with dog love and dog comfort. My sobbing morphed into laughter. And crazy, wild, unexpected joy. I hugged my sweet puppy girl, nestled my nose in her soft fur, felt her presence, her warmth, the vibrant life of her. And I felt better. Layla made it clear to me that we are here now, and this is no small thing. We have this. This. 

So yeah, I get it. In this context, the waiting is not so bad. The something to do while I’m waiting, while I’m waiting for something to do, is to live, and love, and celebrate every second of “now” that I can get my hands on, with my husband, with my parents, with my exceptional daughters, with my amazing, sweet, extraordinary, empathic dog. 

Here’s to NOW. Thank you, Layla.

Remarkably Bright Book Club Noshes

Since it’s been so long since I posted on this blog page, I thought it was time to refresh it with something fun that is both BOOK and FOOD related.

I’ve belonged to a fabulous Book Club for about 20 years and every month, we take turns choosing the book and hosting the meetings with appropriate goodies that correspond to the book we’ve just read. Now these are smart, creative women, and the bar is high, believe me. 

Last night it was my turn to host, and the book I’d chosen was Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt. 

It’s about a woman named Tova working at an aquarium who becomes friends with a Giant Pacific Octopus/escape artist named Marcellus. Marcellus serves as one of the narrators of the book (I LOVED the audiobook and the narration of the octopus by Michael Urie), and helps Tova unravel the mystery of her son’s death in the sea thirty years earlier. 

We all agreed that we loved the book, and gave it 4 out of 5 stars, withholding only one star due to some plot twists that pushed the willing suspension of disbelief a tad too far.

I racked my brain trying to come up with Book Club munchies that would be more creative than just, say, Marcellus’s favorite seafood treats or (God forbid) noshing on octopus itself. (How could anyone ever eat octopus after reading this book or Soul of the Octopus or watching My Octopus Teacher and Secrets of the Octopus?!?)

And so, I scanned the Internet and found surprisingly few options, other than hot dogs sliced into octopus bodies (not particularly appetizing), but finally discovered a creation that made me smile. Hence: Marcellus the Octopus as a vessel for crab dip, with his body a bread bowl from Panera, legs make of Pillsbury bread sticks and tentacles of black olive slices.

Not an original idea, but it made everybody laugh. Feel free to steal. 

Wandering in the Labyrinth (Thoughts During a Long Illness)

“There are a lot of nasty viruses out there,” my doctor told me recently. I was in her office because I had one of them. “Every morning before we come to work, we take a deep breath to prepare ourselves for whatever we might be facing that day.” When I told her how much I appreciated her, I cried. 

I partly blame my blubbering on my illness. And partly because, well, that’s me. I’m a blubberer. Sad, happy, grateful; in my world, all strong emotions trigger tears. Plus, the medical profession has taken a big hit from the trauma of the Covid years, and I’m so glad my PCP is still there for me. Many others have retired or fled. 

But back to my diagnosis: Labyrinthitis. It sounds kind of mystical and magical, doesn’t it? I’m in a labyrinth, a maze of sorts, a fantasy world where anything could happen. In truth however, it is not mystical or fantastical. Not in the least. It is clogged up ears (did you know you have a part of your inner ear called a labyrinth? Now you do), plus dizziness, inability to focus, and for a few horrible, hellish hours early on, vertigo. It started with a bad cold, one month ago today. The plugged ears came a few days later. They still haven’t cleared. 

“It could take weeks,” my doctor told me. “Possibly even six weeks.” When I Googled it, I was assured that “most people fully recover within a year or two.”

I am not completely deaf, but the world is exceedingly muffled. It’s like my head is underwater at the same time I’m trying to navigate my way through a world of cotton batting. I mostly stay at home, trying to rest and recover, but now and then I venture out, trying to feel “normal,” and feel dismayed because I can’t fully depend on one of my critical senses. (Apologies again to the woman in the grocery story I backed into because I had no awareness that she was behind me. As I stumbled away, embarrassed, that made me cry, too.)

It is hard for me to do any writing in the labyrinth. It is hard to make art. In general, it is hard to focus on anything. Coloring books help. When I’m feeling particularly woozy and lethargic, I watch TV with close captioning to while away the hours until I am better. My favorite show lately is “The Great Pottery Throwdown.” But when that sweet British judge Keith gets choked up over someone’s work, I cry too, and Lord knows I don’t need to generate any more moisture in this noggin of mine. 

A glimmer of silver lining: As a result of this diagnosis, I decided it to do some research into Labyrinths. Being of a spiritual bent, I am intrigued by the potential of labyrinths as meditation tool. At the moment, I don’t know of any outdoor, actual labyrinths to walk near me, but the research is uplifting, and I’ve enjoyed printed-page labyrinths that I’ve traced with a pencil. Although the goal is to meander to the center of the labyrinth and then back out again to contemplate how the journey has impacted you, it didn’t make sense for me to leave. And so I remain there, in the center. 

Sometimes it’s a lovely, quiet, restful place. To count the many blessings in my life. To empathize with others who find themselves suffering from hearing loss or simply a need to rest because of physical challenges. Still, I look forward to the day when I can find my way out of the labyrinth and see what I have learned from the journey.

Does anyone reading this have a labyrinth story to share? Either of a literal labyrinth, or an experience that has felt like this? I would love to hear from you.

In the meantime, I send greetings from within the labyrinth.

It Seems to Me the Good Things Come in Whispers

It seems to me the good things come in whispers. Soft, like a breeze in a garden, making flowers nod their heads and bees hold on tight for the ride. Just a gentle nudge that says life, life, and more life. These things are good and simple. 

Can a heavy boot come along and squash the flowers to the ground, grind the bees into the dirt? Sure. It’s not hard. A lawn mower could come and decapitate every one of those flowers. A bulldozer could rip up the land and turn it into a parking lot and none of those flowers or the bees would whimper a single audible protest. 

It’s easy to smash down what is quietly sweet and possesses a fragile sort of power. So why do I sometimes imagine that my one voice might help tilt the world toward love and compassion? It’s too easy to destroy my voice, to destroy me. Power is a beast, a dragon, with cruel intentions. If sweet good things are in the way of power and money and corruption, we have few avenues to fight. And progress is painfully slow. Corruption is terrifyingly swift. 

I still choose what is sweet and good and quiet because it is the only thing that soothes me. A million flower seeds will wait in that soil when the bulldozers drive away. One day, when the change of seasons has split the asphalt, the sprouts will seek sunlight and push their way through the cracks; gentle opportunists. Survivors, sweetly and silently triumphant. And the bees will come.

I Used to Sing in a Rock Band

I’ve been wondering lately what I should put on this page to update it. (Because it’s been a while and I feel bad–people still do check in on me from time to time, which I appreciate!) So I decided to share something fun: I used to be in a blues rock band called the Benjamin Road Band.

The inspiration for this post is simply that I stumbled across a few former bandmates from the Benjamin Road Band recently at a favorite restaurant, and it has reminded me of this amazing, fun, exciting time in my life, which occurred nearly ten years ago. But happened.

I mean, WHAT? I was lead singer in a BAND? I actually got to do this? They let me??

It’s not like we got famous outside our own circles or anything, (even though—cough—I’m proud to say we performed for six and a half solid years and were finalists in the Boston Blues Challenge of 2011), we were still middle-aged folks having fun in a cover band. And although we were on TV, it was local access with incorrect graphics at the beginning. (No, were were not a Rolling Stones band.)

But there’s no denying it was our sweet, modest claim to fame, and well worth our time and energy and dreams and angst.

And yes, it is fun to look back and remember.

My Trump Love Garden

Summer 2017

Spiders were copulating above my flower pot garden, and the seeds I thought would never grow had finally sprouted. I’d worried and fretted that the soil was too dry, the drainage poor, the skies too rainy or hot or sunny, or that my disposition was too resentful. Yet little by little, life found its way through the soil in my Trump Love Garden. 

Yes, that is what I called it. 

I planted these seeds while weeping over my inability to think even one good thought about the president of the United States, until it got so bad I couldn’t live with myself.

But that’s what I got for going back to church. 

After the 2016 election, I was so confused and perplexed and troubled over the state of the country, I decided to give organized Christianity another shot and see if there was comfort there. 

That particular summer Sunday in 2017, the message was, “We are all children of God, in whom God is well pleased.” 

Why yes, that felt nice. I do perceive the Divine spirit as being an equal-opportunity lover of all humanity. I tucked that sweet nugget away for later.

But then the pastor threw down a challenge: “Think of a specific person who is hard to perceive as being loved by God. Recognize that they too, are God’s child.” 

My contented smile twitched and nearly morphed into an un-Christian-like sneer.

Hold on. Wait. God loves…him? God is well pleased with…him? Really?

The chill I felt was an icicle to my heart. 

I’ve been taught all my life by religious parents to “love my neighbor.” But am I required to do that even if I believe that neighbor is doing egregious harm to others?

A black cloud followed me home. Well screw that. The man’s a monster! How is he worthy of love, divine or otherwise? I swirled around in this vortex of negativity and anger and fear for hours. How could I claim to be an agent of a loving Divine spirit of light, yet harbor such an ugly darkness inside me? 

Hoping to salvage my Sunday afternoon, I calmed myself and came to a conclusion: Even if I’m supposed to love my neighbor, nobody ever said I had to like him. I will always vote against this man, fight his policies, rail against his lies and corruption. But if I’m also to practice self-love, I must refuse to allow his darkness to seep into my soul and do me harm. 

I needed to find a way to celebrate love, hope, life, and peace. Even in the time of Trump.

Although I’m not particularly gifted in the field of horticulture, I decided to take a leap of faith and plant a garden. A Trump Love Garden. I’d gather some beautiful pots, plant several different kinds of seeds and see if I could encourage life and growth and abundance. 

Armed with this focus and a purpose, I drove to a nearby garden center and scanned the seed aisle, seeing if any of the names on the packets inspired me. 

The first to catch my eye was a violet mix called “Heart’s Ease.”  Uh, yep. I was clearly in great need of that. The next packet I chose promised flowers that would feed and attract butterflies. Butterflies are symbols of rebirth and resurrection. Life, fed and celebrated. This seemed like a good sign. The third packet I chose was Morning Glories. Yeah. Glory in the Morning. It sounded like hope.

I added to these one of the leftover packets of wildflower seeds my daughter had provided as take-home favors at her wedding earlier that summer. As much as the cherished memory of my daughter’s marriage clashed with my ill feelings toward the president, the seeds symbolized for me love and growth.

So I brought my seed packets home, and set about planting my Trump flowerpot garden.  

Calming classical music played. I lit a citrusy candle and laid newspaper on a kitchen counter. Breaking up rich potting soil between my fingers, I performed for myself a sacred little ritual, combining soil, water, seeds, prayers, and—I don’t mind telling you—a few tears. I was grateful for them. I wanted to feel this, I wanted my heart involved, so it would matter.

And when I was done, I set the four pots outside in the sunshine to wait and see what story they had to tell me. 

A week passed. Nothing happened. Was this the message this garden was meant to convey? That nothing good would come of my paltry efforts to find love amid antipathy? Yet in good faith, I watered my seeds of hope and waited some more. 

Finally during the second week, the first little pops of green shrugged through the dirt. The Morning Glory was first. Hope springs eternal. Hope is the bird with feathers. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. Yes. A few days later, another pot showed signs of life. It was the butterfly garden, sending out sweet tentative shoots. And then, seedlings from the wedding packet whispered the power of enduring love. 

As for Heart’s Ease? It was a no-show. The flower pot offered me nothing but cold, black earth. Which just figured. 

Still, I waited, and hoped for the best.

And finally, three weeks in, Heart’s Ease showed a wink of green, a speck of life. It was the same day I observed spiders copulating in the web above the Trump Love Garden. They were embracing, all close to each other, with their long, spindly black legs intertwined. 

Another male tried to approach the female while I watched, and the favored male rushed over to say, yo get lost buddy, and went back to the female to let her know what had happened. I swear I watched the spider interaction, the way his face grew close to hers and their front legs touched. Communicating spiders. And then, when it seemed the threat of the extra male had passed, they got all intimate again. 

My little garden turned lush and healthy during that wet, fecund summer of 2017, boasting glory in the morning followed by butterfly food and wedding wildflowers with a touch of heart’s ease beneath the bedchamber of procreating spiders in love. 

Almost sounds like poetry, doesn’t it?

I planted the Trump Love Garden to see what kind of story it might have to tell me, and this is what I heard murmured in the summer breeze that fluttered its leaves:

Hope is not only alive in the garden, it is flourishing. Weeping may endure for a very long night and although I don’t understand the mysterious ways in which God loves Trump and is well pleased with him, it’s not my job to understand. 

My job is to plant and nurture to the best of my ability all that is good and full of stubborn, persistent love; to make way for joy in the morning; to bear witness to the flourishing, flowering results of nature at work; to welcome the yellow butterflies who come to feed on the nectar, and the spiders who choose this spot to participate in life’s passion for itself. 

The moral of the story?  If I wish to survive the world, I must strive to allow these realizations to ease my heart, even if (especially if) our political reality is a fucking shit show that makes no sense to me whatsoever.

There. 

My Trump Love Garden taught me that. 

Trying Not to Write. So I Can Write.

I am taking off the month of April. At least, this is my plan. 

Although technically I’m already violating my plan by writing these words right here and now, this is writing, as opposed to WRITING. There’s a difference.

I shall explain. 

I’ve been working on what feels like a VERY IMPORTANT WRITING PROJECT (VIWP), one that has been percolating and haunting and torturing me for almost ten years now. Recently, I got very serious about finishing and polishing this project. I enlisted constructive feedback from mentors and trusted fellow writers and took many classes to refine my craft, and although this input is extremely helpful, I find myself…in a word… 

Paralyzed.

There are too many voices in my head. Too much instruction. 

Is this how it works for some of us? The more we write, the more we learn about the craft and structure and secret inner workings of writing, the harder we try to get it right, the more impossible it is…to actually write? 

The good news is that I know what my problem is. 

I am right-brained. An ENFP. A Gemini. (If any of that matters.) My jam is intuition and gut-feels and expansive skin-tingling soul emotions. 

Take music for example. I love to dance, but choreography cramps my style. I adore singing and do a lot of it, but sight-reading is eternally a struggle for this ear-learner. When I once forced myself to take a music theory class, I felt as though my entire body twitched in revolt, longing to flee. I’ve taken lessons in piano, flute, clarinet, electric guitar, drums, and trumpet, and failed at all of them. 

But yes, I SING. In fact I’ve sung semi-professionally, not always following the notes on the score (although I try, er, generally), but true to what sounds beautiful to my ear and what feels delicious in my body. It has worked for me so far.

Then there’s my love of ART. In college, I considered a double major in English and Art (but settled for an art minor), and have taken countless art classes in the years since then in watercolors, pastels, portrait drawing, mixed media, photography, and acrylics. But when those classes tested my skills in more technical things like vanishing point and scale and math-y stuff like that? Yeah, I was and still am hopeless. 

Please know that I do not want this to be true. I want very badly to master the things I love doing, to take my innate creative longings, to develop and train them. I’m not being stubborn. I have tried. But something restless and rebellious in my core is battling against my own sincere desire to buckle down, learn and get it right. 

So I’ve come to the conclusion there is only one thing I can do. 

I need to stop trying so hard. I need to find my JOY. 

To re-discover the MAGIC. 

Last week, I took an impromptu walk around Walden Pond and fell in love with awakening emerald moss, lacey gray-green lichen, a dead branch with curling gray bark, and last fall’s red and gold oak leaves magnified in clean cold water that rippled in the sunlight. This helped. 

I started working on a collage, ripping up patterned papers, ancient sheets of music and an old National Geographic magazine, to create messy images that please and inspire me. This too, is helping.

I’m reading for fun instead of research. Dancing with my grand-baby in the kitchen to songs I make up for her on the spot. Writing journal entries with zero stakes that make me feel free. Writing this. 

Also, here are some words that resonate for me, from the book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, by Rick Rubin:

We’re not playing to win. We’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A more skillful goal might be to find comfort in the process. To make and put out successive works with ease. 

Oscar Wilde said “Some things are too important to be taken seriously, and art is one of those things.” 

Setting the bar low, especially to get started, frees you to play, explore, and test without attachment to results. This is not just a path to more supportive thoughts. Active play and experimentation until we’re happily surprised is how the best work reveals itself.

Thank you, Rick Rubin. (And thank you, Perry Alison, for making me aware of this book!) 

It is Spring. Nature is waking up, and so I hope, is my joy. 

No more work. It’s time to play.

BEING HENRY DAVID: The Movie!

Full disclosure: Being Henry David is not in theaters…YET. But here’s the exciting news: I have taken the first step.

Being Henry David is officially a screenplay!

This was a project born of Covid isolation, when we became intimate friends with Netflix and Prime and Hulu and HBO and I thought to myself, “Huh…they need a lot of content to create all these shows for all these channels. Why not try my hand at adapting BHD to film?”

And so, dear reader, I did it. I took a bunch of classes through the Gotham Writing Workshop online and via Zoom. (They are fabulous, by the way. Shout out to my instructor C.C. Webster and my tough, discerning, but encouraging classmates!) And it was HARD. I was humbled by how much I didn’t know about screenwriting, and how different it is from writing novels. Then, when I got Covid myself this past May, the silver lining of that long isolation was that I finished the first full draft. I’ve been polishing it obsessively ever since.

Last night, I gathered together a small group of dear friends, most of them seasoned community theater folks, and we did a read-through of the script. It was AMAZING! In addition to it being fun, it was helpful. (Gotta get my red pencil out and do a few more tweaks.) And, a cool fun fact: One of them, Rachel Crane, was one of the first readers of Being Henry David when it was first published in 2013, and this year she graduated from (get this) film school! We had such a great time talking about the excitement and challenges of screenwriting and the “biz.”

Here are a few photos…including a cheesy one of me slapping shut a pretend clapperboard (I had to look up the proper term for that thingie just now…) before shouting “ACTION!” Plus, my cast of fabulous friends and the movie snacks. Yep, I love me a party theme.

So….I am doing this. I’m currently moving forward with this script, making my first connections in the industry, and learning more every day. Obviously, I will keep you posted as things progress!

Wish me well, AND HEY, if you happen to have any connections in the movie business, someone who might find it intriguing that an acclaimed award-winning YA novel has been adapted for film by the original author of said YA novel, please feel free to drop me a note at cal.armistead1@gmail.com.

Hey, it’s a tough business. But you never know…

I Call Them “Calliope Creations”

My latest obsession/ meditation/ artistic outlet is creating hanging wine bottle art. The first step? Drink the wine. (A tough job, but, yeah…) Then my hubby helps out by scoring and cutting the bottoms off the bottles. We sand away the sharp edges, then I go to work (play) adding beads and crystals and shells and rocks and sea glass and pinecones and anything else that catches my eye and inspires me.

Most of the bottles that initially inspired me come from a vineyard called DUCK WALK, in Southold, NY on Long Island. I love this vineyard because the wine is fabulous, the bottles and labels are beautiful, and also because it’s located near where I grew up in Cutchogue, NY. (Back then, current vineyards on the North Fork were typically potato and cauliflower fields.) I live in the Boston area now, but I get back as often as I can to visit old friends. And, of course, stock up on local wine.

After amassing a ridiculous number of these artistic hanging bottles in my home and running out of places to hang them, I came up with an idea. What if Duck Walk might be interested in selling some of my creations there, at the vineyard? People are there to do tastings and buy wine and enjoy occasional live music…and I imagined my bottles right there, looking all twinkly and pretty…

In a bold, hopeful move, I packed up a dozen of my bottles (for fun, I made sure every one featured a semi-hidden duck bead) and went to Duck Walk with a couple friends to offer my wares. The result? They took them on consignment. I was thrilled! I put this website address on the labels for Calliope Creations, but because of some technical difficulties with the camera, I’ve only just now figured out how to post the pics I took of the bottles.

The last I heard, most of the bottles were sold over the holidays–I’m so thrilled!–but I’m still toiling away, drinking wine (hey, it’s part of the job) and playing with beads and shells, so perhaps more will be made available soon. In the meantime, I’m targeting a local vineyard here in the Boston area.

I’m looking at you, Nashoba!

By the way, if you have a special wine bottle you’d like to see turned into art, hit me up… cal.armistead1@gmail.com.

I Do It Because I Can’t Not Do It

One of my favorite questions to ask friends and acquaintances lately is this: What are three things you absolutely need in your life? I don’t mean love, health, sex, shelter, oxygen, the kind of thing everybody wants/needs. I mean the things you do when you have free time to do exactly what you want most to do.  And furthermore, if you’re unable to do these things, you don’t feel right. You’re “off.” It’s like your skin doesn’t fit quite right.

I love to ask this question, because it so often reveals someone’s unique passion or hobby. Like a friend who apparently trained dogs in her free time. How did I not know this? Or the woman sitting beside me at a wedding who crafted musical instruments out of strange objects. Or the high school kid whose hobby was real-life survival games. People can definitely surprise you. 

And so I ask you: What are the three things you do because you can’t not do them?

Here, I’ll share mine—not just because I need desperately to update this page with a new entry so I can finally replace the one about Christmas—but also because I’m feeling chatty. Besides, maybe you want to know. I mean, you’re here, right? On my page and all.  

No big reveal here, but WRITING is, and always has been, my first “thing.” And because it’s also my work, I’m one of those outrageously fortunate people who gets to do what I love most on a daily basis. OH, (she added excitedly), and lately, I’ve been taking classes to explore forms of writing I haven’t tackled before. This week, I’ll start my first Memoir class, and also the third round with Screenwriting. Yep, I’m so excited I can’t stand it. Big time writer geek. 

Second on my list tends to shift over the years. Right now, it’s ART. Especially making multi-media art, collage, and these hanging art things I call (for lack of a more creative, original term) “mobiles.”  I make them out of whatever I fancy in the moment…like beads, crystals, nature stuff like shells and feathers and pinecones, and miscellaneous mementos like keys and lockets and antique jewelry. And I’m learning how to make stained glass and mosaic. In short, I’m obsessed. (Clearly, I also like taking classes.)

Third on my list at the moment is MUSIC, although it used to run a close second. I think it’s because I’ve been able to feed my music passion over the years by doing so much of it. I was lead singer in a band for 6 ½ years, had a handful of leading roles in community theater (my favorite was Martha in “The Secret Garden”), and I’ve sung semi-professionally in an a cappella group for the past 18 years. But—true story—soon my group will be disbanding.  Without a regular fix of singing, will I experience withdrawal? Will I seek a new outlet? We will see…

There.

I have successfully replaced my Christmas entry, and had fun blathering on about myself for a little while. If you’re still with me now and have read all the way to the end, God love ya. And hey, tell me your three things. I want to know.