The Bare Nail

He did not want our respect; he wanted our terror. He ruled our childhood with an iron fist, an authoritarian who believed a daughter’s obedience was forged only in fear.

Memory has a violent gravity. I can still feel the sudden, breathless lift of being six years old, hoisted off the linoleum by my collar, pinned against the wall like a specimen, and dropped just as fast. It was not uncommon. Neither was the orbit of being thrown across a room, or the sharp, sickening crack of my head being banged into my little sister’s as he drove home a point.

Looking back, I see a man tearing himself apart. He was caught in the suffocating friction between the father and husband he was supposed to be, and the man he desperately wanted to be with J-----.

J----- was the woman he left us for. She was the mirage he chased, only to leave her, too, for another wife in a cycle of endless running.

But back then, there was only the climate of our house: a perpetual walking on glass. We held our breath, waiting for the shatter.

Then came the day he left for good, after so many false departures. I remember walking into my parents' closet. The space was cavernous, emptied of his presence. His clothes were gone. And there, on the wall, the nail was bare. The belts he used to beat us with were gone.

I stood in the quiet of that closet and felt no sadness. Only a vast, clean rush of relief.

The glass had finally stopped breaking. We could finally step down.

The space between the bare nail in the closet and a healthy love wasn't a straight line. It was a vast, winding wilderness.

 It took many years, a thousand miles of running, and many more stories left in my wake before the ground beneath my feet finally stopped shaking.

I had to live out the rebellion he left in my blood. I had to mistake chaos for passion, and survival for living, burning through people and places just to prove I couldn't be pinned against a wall ever again. Every scar from that wilderness carries a story of its own—the reckless impulses, the ghosts I chased in the dark, and the messy trail I left behind while trying to figure out who a scrapper is when she stops fighting.

Those chapters are heavy, and they are loud. But they are the exact stories that taught me how to heal.

---

A Poet's Failure

My coffee is getting cold

And I'm too stuck for a poem

To reheat or refill my cup

With a hotter version



It just happens too often

Trying and trying

Staring into the faces

That pass before me...



Hoping for a story in their eyes

Or smile or clothes



Blank as paper they go by

The grass is green

The sky is blue

Life is getting too damned cliche'



There are no conversations I can steal

And the news is always a rerun

I look into my cup of coffee

There are no clouds



Just me...

Looking back....

At me



And I've failed you

Assuming you have even read this far

I have no profound ending



Nothing to sit you back

In your chair with envy

That you didn't write it first



So I guess you can feel good

That you still can.



(* Written for my sister Julie)

Ode to the Unspoken

When I asked,
they answered without speaking
“Prepare yourself.
Everything is about to change—radically.”

Their actions showed the truth.
Now silence reigns between us.
I no longer write of my baby sister, that old boyfriend or those grandchildren.

Instead, I set down
the history we were meant to learn from,
yet refused.

They showed you who they were—
not once, but again and again—
through the quiet testimony of their actions.

Why, then,
did we choose not to believe them?

My Father: The Love Language of Ten Bright Dimes

Pause right here. Put down your coffee cup.

This isn’t a post to skim through while you multitask. What you are about to read requires you to slow down, step away from the noise, and actually reflect. It is raw, contradictory, and deeply personal.

If you are ready to look beneath the surface, read on:

We are made of such brief, porous architecture, aren't we? Collecting the heat of skin and the heavy geometry of rooms, never truly measuring the gravity of what we hold until the air shifts. My father is gone now, stolen away a few years back by the cruel, eroding currents of Alzheimer’s, leaving only the sharp, clean ache of his absence. Now, I am left standing in the quiet, trying to gauge the true weight of a man who was made entirely of opposing storms.

My father was a beautiful, curious contradiction—a man built out of opposing forces. He was drawn to the silhouette of skinny women, a sharp contrast to the ritual he performed with us girls at the supper table. There, he would reward whoever ate the most with ten bright dimes, silver passport tokens meant for the slot machine waiting in the basement.

I see now that this preoccupation with a full belly was the language of an old wound. As a boy, he had been given away by his own parents, left to be raised by her uncle and aunt on a small island clipped by the currents of the Mississippi River. Their reality was sparse. It was a life made of doing without. Yet, in that poverty, he was fiercely loved by an aunt he called "Mama".

"Mama" was the great-aunt who raised him, the woman I called Grandma Edna. She left us when I was just under 5 years old, but her ghost remains entirely unblemished in my mind; to my childhood eyes, she walked on water. I can still close my eyes and feel the physical gravity of her love—a heavy, warm tenderness whenever she held me or spoke my name. Today, her wedding ring lives on my finger. She has been gone since 1967, but the gold still remembers.

Because my father often went to bed with a half-empty stomach, he spent our childhoods ensuring his daughters never would.

We had a slot machine in our basement. It seems an absurd artifact now, but in the 1960s and '70s, didn't every subterranean concrete room hold a pool table, a bar, and the flashing promise of a jackpot? Ours did.

Down in that dim light, we learned the early language of currency and competition. He would reward us with bright dimes for that slot machine whenever we out-ate our sisters, or when we finished a chore before the others. To be the fastest to cross the line first was a currency he respected. He was quietly teaching us how to survive the race.

He was a man who lived in those overlapping shadows—drawn to the thin silhouettes of other women yet placing silver into our small palms to ensure his own daughters grew sturdy and armored against a harsh world.

I still remember the tactile weight of him in the aisles of Kmart. It was a different era, back when the air in public spaces was heavy with the haze of cigarette smoke. He would walk with a lit cigarette balanced in his right hand, while my seven-year-old fingers clung tightly to the first two fingers of his left. He possessed a peculiar, rebellious streak; he thought it a clever victory whenever he "accidentally" left an item tucked away in the bottom of the shopping buggy, escaping the cashier's notice.

Yet, the paradox deepens there. While he took those small shortcuts, he held his daughters to a fierce, uncompromising standard of honesty. He simply knew how to locate the shortest distance between himself and his desires—whether that path led to women, motorcycles, uncounted store items, or a gambling table.

But beneath the lawless charm was a bone-deep devotion to labor and duty. He was one of the hardest-working men to ever cross my path—unfailing, reliable, and solid as iron. Every single day, without fail, he showed up to work at the Rock Island Arsenal, that heavy military base where weapons are forged. I don't think he ever called in sick. If anything, he arrived early, stepping into the day with a predictable clockwork momentum. I can still hear him say it: "Eight hours work for eight hours pay, that’s the way to do it, boy."

Yes, he called me "boy." He called my sisters "boy," too. He wasn't a man who knew how to wear softness on his sleeve, nor was he versed in the tender vocabulary of endearment. But he took care of us in the ways he understood. He believed in meeting his obligations to the penny and the clock; he was immaculately prompt in paying his bills, anchoring himself to a quiet financial discipline that he fiercely taught me to mirror.

Even when the air shifted and he left us, his sense of duty never truly vanished. The child support was always paid, and every single Sunday in those first few years after he left, he sat down to type us a letter on his manual typewriter. Without fail, the postman delivered it into our hands by Thursday of each week.

My husband calls me a scrapper now, a title given in jest but rooted in absolute truth. I look in the mirror and recognize the architecture. I am my father’s daughter.

There is a quiet, feral instinct in how I move through this world. You can see it in the sharp calculation of my eyes at the auction block, waiting for the exact moment to strike, or in the restless rhythm of a flip, turning dust into profit. Like him, I am bound by a strange duality—a romance with the clever bargain, shadowed by the rigid obligation to clear my debts before the sun sets. When the hunger takes over, it isn’t about greed; it is about survival. I am a scrapper at my core, possessing an internal compass that cuts through the noise to chart the absolute shortest path to my goals, fiercely clawing my way toward the life I am determined to claim.
But also like him, I am anchored by hard work, and I will fight like a Mama Bear for the people I love.

He was such a curious contradiction in so many ways. And in so many ways, I am the continuation of his stride.

It is a heavy thing, carrying the blueprint of the people who made us. Sometimes, art catches up to our own ghosts and echoes them right back to us.


I am attaching a music video below these pictures—a song that unspools these very threads of bloodline, struggle, and survival. In fact, it was this song that inspired me to write this entry in my blog that you are now reading.


As you watch it, you might hear the rhythm of your own history. For me, it is a mirror. It reminds me that we do not arrive in this world entirely blank; we are chiseled by the hands that held us, the basements we grew up in, and the silent sacrifices of those who came before. Take a moment, press play, and look into the shadows with me.
I am my father's daughter
















Sometimes, art catches up to our own ghosts and echoes them right back to us.
I am attaching a music video below—a song that unspools these very threads of bloodline, struggle, and survival. In fact, it was this song that inspired me to write this entry in my blog that you are now reading.


As you watch it, you might hear the rhythm of your own history. For me, it is a mirror. It reminds me that we do not arrive in this world entirely blank; we are chiseled by the hands that held us, the basements we grew up in, and the silent sacrifices of those who came before. Take a moment, press play, and look into the shadows with me.

Click here to listen to the song I Am My Fathers Daughter

In a Single Second - Tribute to my sister Ronda

Today, she would have stepped into fifty-one. 

Instead, time remains frozen for Ronda at nineteen, slipping through our fingers in the quiet, sudden fracture of a single second. 

One swift impact, and a beautiful life was paused mid-motion. 

It left behind a heavy, wild stillness—the kind of quiet we spend decades trying to soften with memory. 

We carry her absence not as a darkening shadow, but as a fierce, enduring warmth. Loved deeply, missed entirely, and cradled in the rawest corners of our hearts every single day.

Click here for Video Tribute Ronda

Angels Ride Shotgun: Rediscovering My 2012 Crash

Today was spent cleaning and organizing. No small task and will take more than one day for sure.

After sorting through an old cabinet, tossing faded snaps and dusty letters, I came across these pics from my 2012 motorcycle crash. I was with a group of friends riding to the Patriot Guard Riders annual Gathering of the Guard (GOTG) here in South Carolina.

Riders with me that day claimed straight-up sabotage on my bike, nothing I did wrong. But admittedly, I’ve left my share of (figuratively) dead bodies in the rearview mirror, so I had certainly earned a few enemies.

 
I was launched over the handlebars at breakneck speed, slammed into a car hood.

 
Still breathing after that? Pure miracle. Holding onto these—reminds me angels ride shotgun and I’m tougher than anything gunning me.

Confessions of a Former Shadow Girl

Did you know that when I was small, I was the shadow girl?

In the early years, the teachers quietly gave up on anchoring my attention. They spoke in a language I understood perfectly, yet my mind had already slipped through the floorboards, wandering off to ride bareback horses through dense, unfiltered woods.

There was a sensory overload in their structured world that I couldn't quite map, so I learned the art of disappearing. I was picked on sometimes, but mostly I just dissolved into the wallpaper. I became a master of the chameleon’s trade, masking the static in my head by mimicking the stillness of the room.

Safety was a solitary geometry. I spent hours—sometimes days—contained within the silent perimeter of my bedroom. Armed with a fierce devotion to pencils, pens, and the tactile perfection of crisp, untouched notebooks, I built a kingdom out of raw imagination. I cataloged prose and spun complex, meticulous worlds just to whisper them back to myself at night. Huddled under the blankets, the heavy weight of a red plastic flashlight anchored in my small hands, I let the warm beam—powered by the steady hum of its two C batteries—illuminate my hidden pages, tucked into the heavy, echoing quiet of the house.

Outdoors, the hyper-focus shifted but never faded. I lived in the architecture of the woods, building secret forts and scaling the highest, thinnest branches of the tallest trees, needing to see the world from a vantage point where it couldn’t touch me. The social code of humans felt like a foreign tongue, so I negotiated elsewhere. I whistled perfect, repetitive echoes to the birds, confided my secrets to the stray cats I constantly brought home, and organized intricate, silent conspiracies with our toy poodle.

Over time, I fell in love with melancholy because it was predictable; it never abandoned me, and the deep isolation eventually etched itself right into my skin. It took decades to find the clinical name for the way my wiring functions, to understand that inside I am a chamber of hot, pressurized lava leaking from a perpetually volcanic heart. Sometimes, the only way to quiet the deafening hum of the world and soothe my racing thoughts is an absolute absence of execution—to drop all demands and exist entirely inside the soft, unchanging sensory boundaries of my pajamas.

Yet, even when the outside world stops asking things of me, my own internal machinery takes over. I immediately begin spinning a new web of rigid rules, intense passions, and high expectations to impose upon myself. It is a constant, exhausting internal loop—but I realize now, it is precisely the rhythm that keeps me sane.

---

Bella's Tale - Whatever happened to Bella? Chapter 12

It has been 10 years and a lifetime ago since I published Bella's Tale.

Bella went to a family in Michigan. Sadly, I do not know how her life turned out.

As I look back a decade later, I am grateful for those lessons Bella taught me.

My young German Shepherd Diesel mentioned in my Bella blog, was buried this year at the old age of 12. He was a faithful and loyal companion, and my heart feels heavy still, as I type these words and remember him.

My life has changed in so many ways since a decade ago when I first wrote Bella's Tale. I am happier and more content. I am also older and grayer.

I noticed today that a comment made by my dad to one of my posts in Bella's Tail. He is in his 80's now and has advanced Alzheimer's. It was bitter-sweet to see his comment today.

I will keep this blog up and running as long as the server will allow it. If you are wanting to foster or wanting to adopt, I wish you the best in your endeavors. I to this day, do not regret mine.

(If you came here to read the Tales of Bella the deaf foster Great Dane I had, you can go here and read from the bottom up to read chronologically). Bella's Tale

You Will Be There: Remembering Spotted Bear

The drive home from the hospital is always the heaviest. Tonight, it hit me: seven days. A week of normal workdays since the phone call shattered the South Carolina quiet, sending me on a morning flight to Illinois. They told me he had collapsed in the ER parking lot after driving himself there. A heart stopping and starting for over an hour.

When I walked into the CVICU, the room was a symphony of modern tragedy. Wires and tubes claimed every orifice of his body. I did what I always do—I brought the outside world in. I talked about the weather. I told him about Pat’s upcoming hunting trip to Montana because he always liked to ask. I dabbed a tiny, wet sponge across his lips. Then, I sat in the green plastic chair.

His breathing was a rapid, desperate dance—metabolic acidosis forcing his body to hyperventilate against the machine. Then, the monitor would flatline into a sinus pause. I counted the seconds in the quiet. One, two, three, four... five, six, seven... nineteen, twenty. Finally, a jagged P wave and QRS would bloom across the screen. I would breathe again. Over and over.

The doctor broke down the arithmetic of his fading body. A head bleed from the parking lot fall. A massive clot suffocating his lungs, and legs choked by deep vein thrombosis. We couldn’t thin the blood to melt the clots because of the bleed in his brain. The liver and kidneys were already dark, starved of oxygen during the arrest.

To my medical friends: a lactic acid of 14. Creatinine at 4. PEEP maxed at 12. Levophed running wide open just to keep a whisper of blood pressure. Bilateral subdural hematomas. No urine in 18 hours.
My nurse brain knew the exact destination of those numbers. But my heart whispered, try anyway.

So we did. And Bear tried, too.

Around 4:30 in the morning, his body began to tucker out. I held his hand, looked into his eyes, and explained the battlefield. I told him about the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, and the impossible catch-22 of the blood clots and the head bleed. I asked him if he was ready to let the medications go and pull the breathing tube.

He nodded. He squeezed my hand.

As tears spilled down my face, our eyes locked. Then Bear winked!!! Yes he winked at me. He KNEW what was happening. 

In that single, fleeting second, the hospital room dissolved. I was transported twenty years back in time. I remembered standing before him, my tongue bitter with youth and anger, telling him he would die a lonely old man. I was furious for the trail of broken hearts he’d left behind—including my mother’s—and the children he had abandoned, my late sister Ronda among them.

Back then, he had just looked at me and said, "No I won't. YOU will be there."

How prophetic. How beautifully, terribly prophetic.

I prayed to Wa-kon-tah, the Great Spirit of his people, the Wah-Zha-Zhi Osage tribe. I used the Eagle feather during my prayer, covering him from head to toe, carrying out the old death rituals of his tribe to the best of my ability. When the prayer was done, I placed the sacred feather gently on his chest, and he held onto it.

After the prayer, the nod, and that final wink, I looked up at the doctor. "Okay."

They pushed the Morphine. They turned off the drips. They pulled the tube. As Bear would have said, they pulled the plug. It took less than two minutes. Then, the deepest quiet. No beeps. No artificial rising of the chest. I had the strangest, lingering thought that he would suddenly wake up and tell me what death felt like—as if he’d just conquered one last grand adventure.

At work, I am perfectly normal. I can recite the medical timeline of his death in a cool, monotone voice to my colleagues. But on the dark drive home, the routine breaks. I used to call Bear on these drives. Now, I get home, sit with Pat, and the weeping just comes. Pat holds me close, repeating the words I need to hear: You did everything you could.

Bear left many children in his wake. I’ve only ever met one—Miah. Bear introduced us fifteen years ago at a Chinese restaurant, casually saying, "Here is your brother." Looking into Miah's eyes was like looking directly at my sister Ronda. It pulled hard on a deep, buried ache. Miah got a raw deal, just like the others. They deserved his time far more than any inheritance.

I have his old scrapbooks now, thick with letters from the 1950s. They contain a story Bear never told me—letters from him and his sister as children, begging their own alcoholic, philandering father for a single visit, for a scrap of attention. A centuries-old cycle of abandonment written in faded ink.

Now, I sit in the quiet after the storm, tracing the invisible lines of a legacy left behind. The anger of the past has softened into something heavy and still. I am left holding the weight of an Eagle feather, a prophecy fulfilled against all odds, and the lingering light of a final, defiant wink.

An Ode to My Grandma Gladys, "Dutch"

We all carry inside us, the people who came before us.

I want to tell you about my Grandma Gladys. Everyone called her Dutch.

There is a quiet theater to the memory of her. This picture shows her with sixty years of living, rushing down the asphalt in a Corvair convertible, her hair caught in the wild draft of the highway.



There was a wildness beneath her stillness, a raw texture that felt both ancient and fleeting. "Dutch" was one of twelve—a farmhouse thick with breath, anchored deep in the rural Indiana dust. She was spun from that very soil, carrying a sharp, unpretentious grace that needed no defense. A woman who could bend low, whisper to the soil, and make the earth listen. Her touch was a quiet spell; everything she planted grew.

Saturday nights tasted like raw truth and unvarnished Stroh’s beer, under the dim, low-lit hum of the Eagles club. No filters. Sharp-witted and beautifully flawed, she loved with a heavy, magnetic weight that still anchors itself in the center of my chest.

She lived for many years after the Corvair blurred down those back roads. But time slips through our fingers. Now, the motion has stopped, leaving only the memories and pictures of my grandmother in my mind and heart.

This week, the last of the farm's light went out. Aunt Grace,​ my grandmother's sister left us at ninety-five. She was the final thread connecting us to that Indiana soil, the last of twelve children who once ran through fields that now feel thousands of miles and lifetimes away.

It is a strange sort of grief, a disconnection from the very place that held our beginnings.
The present feels like a shadow of what came before, a quiet ache for a time we can no longer touch. We are left holding the pieces of a past that has already moved on, listening to the soft, fading echo of a home that now exists only in our memories.

Sisters, Gladys and Grace

To Run the Beast Against the Storm

My dog Diesel grabs the leash behind the kitchen door before I can, and it trails behind him in the wind as he flies out through the front door while I check for keys in my pocket and hurriedly put my MP3 music into my ears.

The morning breeze tickles my nose, and I sneeze as I catch up with him. By the time our legs hit the end of the dirt road, we have exercised ourselves warm and we exhale bigger and bigger clouds into the crisp air. The long dirt road is completely deserted the empty corn, and bean fields lay open and beautiful in their rolling hills and my skin pulls over my face tight and rosy cheeked and almost hurts from smiling.

As we come back from our two-mile walk, I cross over onto my damp green lawn I take off my shoes and socks and roll up denim pants to reach my knees. The sky is wide open, the clouds angry and wild as we run together along the green grass. And I can hear him breathing, in and out, adrift and his heart is pounding as free and screaming as my own.

While We Weren't Looking

Today as I stood over a stove making enchiladas with my best friend Nancy, something happened.

In the middle of our girl-day, while laughing and talking and making dozens of enchiladas, her daughter and boyfriend walked into the house.

Beth was 14 when I met her. She used to come to my house and play my piano and ride my 4-wheeler all over the farm, hell-bent on scaring me to death with her daring feats and terribly fast speeds. I realized today that all along, despite evidence to the contrary, somewhere in the back of my mind, she was still 14.

Only she isn't.

She is all grown up now, with an apartment, a job, college classes, a boyfriend and a life.

A real life, all her own.

She came in to the kitchen and we talked about Tofu. She asked what we were doing as she stared in awe at the greasy mess that making enchiladas always brings to the kitchen stove, counters and floor.

Then she told her mom "Mama we are on the way to Kansas City".

Just like that.

And in my brain I thought,

"Wait.... Beth you can't drive yet".

Wait....Beth it is RAINING outside, what if your car hydroplaned?"

Wait..... Beth you can't go to KANSAS CITY with a boy!"

"Wait .... Beth you don't REALLY drive yet, do you?"

"Wait.... Beth you didn't even ASK your mom if you could go on a road trip" - with a BOY, in a CAR, in the RAIN."

But I didn't say any of that. I just insisted on a hug and wished them a good time.

As the door slammed behind them, I reached for another tortilla and began packing and folding the ingredients into the enchilada as I turned to Nancy and proclaimed that

We. Are. Getting . Old.

Where has the time gone? And if Beth is grown up now, where does that leave US?

As I type this tonight I also remember my own children. My baby girl isn't a baby anymore. She is almost 29 years old. My son 24.

They all grew up when we weren't looking.

Kansas City. That is just too far to nonchalantly announce a road trip, even if you ARE all grown up.

Be careful Beth, Stranger Danger and all that stuff, and remember the car is not a 4-wheeler on a field on my farm, so please slow down.

Whispering Dogs Don't Need Dog Whisperers

 

She awakens at 2:47 am, hearing her Shepherd calling her name.


So, with yesterday's mouth and tonight's' hot flashes, she crawls out of bed to the window. The blinds give way to velvet and silence. The fields outside are foggy and snow covered and the moon always lunatic like her hair that danced the topsy turning dance with her pillow.


She calls Diesel, her Shepherd into the kitchen and tries to teach him yet another new trick called find the ball in the pillowcase. Diesel looks up at her. Big brown eyes, long furry-tailed, with the found ball at his feet.


They share some cheese and crackers. Hot flushed skin and cotton pjs meet the cold seat of the kitchen chair and she pours herself a glass of water to toast to the plate of crackers and cheese she's set on the wooden floor.


They talk. She mutters her words through fingertips into thick fur. Kneading in questions. Petting in secrets. And Diesel, he grumbles back his clever answers. Universal truths. Wisdom and knowledge in exchange for cheese offerings.


He lays down at her feet walking first in circles, unwinding himself like a coil spring against her ankles and woolly socks before growing tired and returning for now to the cool wooden floor where he guards the front door and where slumber awaits him.
On another night again, he will make sure to serenade her awake for another secret rendezvous soon.

PATRIOT GUARD RIDERS AND MY MOMENT OF TRUTH

Today I said the Pledge of Allegiance.

I want to shout it from the highest rooftops: "I said the Pledge!".

Most of you reading this would wonder why I think this is such a huge deal.

It was the first time I have ever said the Pledge. And oh what pride it brought me. And oh how humbled I was.

Most of you grew up in the day when we stood in class after the bell rang, and before the first book was pulled out of our desks, you stood at the side of your desk and put your right hand over your heart as you looked over in the corner up by the ceiling where our American Flag hung.

And you said the Pledge of Allegiance.

Every day, 5 days a week, 9 months of every year from the time you were 5 til you were at least 12, you got to do this.

I never did. It was not a choice given to me. Not in the world I lived in. My mother belonged to a religious group. This religion taught her that to pledge your allegiance to anyone except to God was wrong. It taught her that to support an earthly government meant that you were siding with Satan himself instead of God.

In turn, what that religion taught my mother, my mother taught me. So at the tender age of 5, I would stand at the side of my desk with my hands at my sides*(out of respect only, as per moms instructions). Incidentally, peer pressure is incredible, and it did take a great deal of courage on my part throughout the years to hold my ground and to stand only but not pledge, however misguided my intentions were.

So I stood in silence as the rest of my class put their hand to their heart and Pledged their allegiance to the United States of America.

Throughout my entire childhood, I stood but never saluted, I stood but never pledged.

I never became a member of her religion (meaning I was never baptized). I have respect for them, (most really are good people, just misguided). But when you are a child and your mother and every one you are allowed to associate with teaches you certain principles, or doctrines, you don't question it. Not at age five....not even at age ten. But by the time I was sixteen, I had moved out of my mothers home.

At 17 when I graduated from High School, I signed up to join the Air Force. Whether out of rebellion directed at my mother or her religion, or because I did sense a level of responsibility to my country (probably a bit of both) I was determined I was going to make a career out of being in the Air Force.

I met a with Sgt. Brenner, I took the ASVAB and I was set to be sworn in the following week, when I discovered I was pregnant.

So life took another course for me. One that brought me many blessings including the birth of both my children, and my college education where I earned my nursing degree.

But it took more than 20 years for me to shake that religion and all the guilt that accompanied it. Although I never set foot inside of the church my mother belonged to, since moving out of her home at age sixteen, I carried with me the guilt and the indoctrination that the religion brought me, even many years later, when I was 35.

I was 35 years old before I set foot in any church. But this blog entry wasn't meant to delve too deeply into religion. It is to tell you how far I have come and what today meant to me.

When 911 happened, I think I finally broke free from the chains that being raised in my mothers religion had so tightly bound me.

I felt what all of you felt that day. I felt the pain and the anger as well as the patriotism. I remember that for the next several months, Americans became a galvanized union. Every American suddenly became brothers for lack of a better word. We forgot the petty hate. We stopped sweating the small stuff. When the pledge of Allegiance was recited at sports events or schools, everyone stood with hands on hearts, and the American Flag became the beautiful symbol of freedom it was meant to be. And for the first time in my life, I felt the pride in being an American, and the gratitude to all those men and women who laid their lives down so that I could have the freedom NOT to salute when I was a child and knew no better.

Today I said the Pledge of allegiance.

Out loud.

In a room filled with other men and women who hold the respect and who honor all the Veterans of all the wars our great country have fought in.

Being able to finally stand and Pledge my Allegiance to the Flag and the United States of America meant more to me now as a women pushing 50, looking back on her life than it ever could have as the misguided 5 year old in first grade who held her tongue and her hand at her side while the pledge was spoken.

I am proud to be a part of the Illinois, Iowa and South Carolina Patriot Guard. Just ordinary folk who show sincere respect for our fallen heroes, their families, and their communities, and who honor all Veterans past and present.

Being a part of such an organization was long over-due for me. Being a part of the Patriot Guard gives me a long over-due chance to honor those men and women who have laid down their lives for my freedom and those that are continuing to do so in our world today.

Today I said the Pledge of Allegiance.

Although I know everyone in that room said it from their hearts, I know my Pledge came from the depths of mine, with a pride too long suppressed.

Thank you for listening. And Thank You to the soldiers and their families for all you are doing for me and mine.

A Nursing Home Promise and a Sagging Arrowhead

Holy moly heck have things been shaking around here. For starters, at the frail old age of almost-46, I got my first tattoo!

 
Not the kind you put forethought into, and plan ahead for. No, that would be just too responsible, too grown-up like, to "conventional".

 
Instead, I went to a huge tattoo convention with no intent whatsoever of getting a tatoo. It was more to help XXXX find a good artist for HIS mid-life-crisis tattoo. Besides,anyone with the sense of a GOAT knows never to get a tattoo at a CONVENTION, in the BANQUET ROOM of a CASINO!
I have never had any intent of putting a tattoo on THIS old body! But as the old saying goes, "never say never".

Now those of you who know me best, know I rarely color within the lines and have always found a different way to do things than most. But I also take my time in making major life changing decisions....especially true over the past decade.

 
In my defense, I didn't get a 'generic' tattoo. I got the one "in my head". There were tattoo artists from Canada, Los Angeles, San Diego, Florida, New York, Alaska, etc. There was one guy, Dan Hartman whose work stood out way above all the rest.

I told him what kind of tattoo I would want, IF on the rare occasion (like when Jupiter was in line with the moon), I would even THINK I wanted a tattoo. Before I knew it, my new friend Dave, had sketched up almost exactly what I had in my head (a Native American arrow head, with feathers on each side). I think Dave knew he had me at that point.

Fifteen minutes, and two shots of tequila later, I found myself leaning over his table exposing my lower back to this guy I met just 30 minutes earlier. If someone had told me how much a tattoo on the lower back hurt, I would have left with my brain (and skin) still intact. A co-worker asked me later if I had missed that part of Anatomy and Physiology in nursing school (obviously I had-"so we really DO have all kinds of nerves running off the spine, huh?")

But there really are times in life when you just jump off that cliff, 'live life on the edge", "go with your gut" or just plain do something impulsive and spontaneous, and the end results are exactly what you needed and wanted.

I love this tattoo! It is a black and grey tat and is exactly what I had pictured in my minds eye.
My little sister Julie (who thinks she knows everything, obviously), said that this lower back tattoo will very soon be sagging to the level of the crack of my butt....and she is probably right.....my daughter Brooke will just get a good laugh when she comes to visit me in the nursing home.

 
She and my son CJ have already promised me pizza with pineapples and pinto beans and cornbread. We will have long conversations about totally irrelevant things that I won't recall 20 minutes later.
I will wear long white nightgowns and have my very long grey hair hanging down my back, I'll spit in the street in public, and I'll have an arrowhead with Indian feathers in the crack of my butt.

Jesus Christ Superstar and The Day the Cage Dissolved

The air in 1994 tasted different—thick with a decades-old devotion I’d carried like a hidden ember since 1973 when I was 10 ½ years old. For twenty years, Ted Neeley was a ghost I chased through analog corridors, dialing disconnected numbers and sending letters addressed simply to "Hollywood." He had dropped off the edge of the earth after his Ulysses album in 1978, leaving me with nothing but a childhood photo album full of pictures I had collected from magazines of him and a joke I made on a third date in 1981: If ever Ted Neeley comes back to Hollywood, I’m gone. My husband would just roll his eyes from his throne on the couch, the remote control a scepter in his hand, telling me to get over it.

But then, the theater doors reopened. The 20th anniversary tour was announced, and the ghost became flesh.

To understand the gravity of that night, you have to understand the quiet, suffocating gravity of my marriage. For ten years, he was the shadow at my shoulder—driving me to work, policing the grocery store lines by forcing me to take the children as chaperones, barring me from Tuesday night Spanish classes because the world contained other men. He was a man rules-bound and fearful, projecting his own hidden guilt onto the borders of my small life. He only agreed to take me to Charlotte because, for the first time in my marriage, I stood up and said I was going no matter what he did.

The day of the concert, my chest was too small for my breath. I clutched my camera and my childhood photo album. Walking through the lobby, I frantically grabbed a handful of show programs, stuffing them between the pages like hidden treasures.

Our tickets banished us to the very back row. When the usher told me cameras weren't allowed, the old, submissive version of me complied, sinking into the dark. But as the final notes rang out and the cast took their final bows, a spark ignited. I told my husband I was going to the front just to see. He walked toward the safety of the lobby restrooms, and I marched down the aisle.

Standing at the edge of the stage, the universe narrowed. Ted Neeley and Carl Anderson looked down. Eye contact. A direct line of electricity. I held up my sacred photo album and mouthed, “Will you sign my book?” Ted nodded. In my beautiful, chaotic vertigo, all twenty programs I’d smuggled inside the album burst free, scattering across the floor like autumn leaves. I stood there, looking like an idiot, and a second later the heavy curtain fell. They were gone.

In that fraction of a second, the girl who always followed the rules vanished. A woman possessed took her place.

I made a straight line for the backstage door. When the guard blocked my path, I threw on a mask of official, intimidating seriousness. "Ted is expecting me," I commanded. He firmly told me to leave. The mask shattered, and the raw, weeping truth poured out. I began to cry, begging, pleading: "Mister, please, you don't know. I have followed this man since 1973. I just have to meet him. Please." Softened by the sheer weight of my grief, he took mercy. "Ok, come in, but stand right here and don't move."

I stood frozen in that backstage hallway for twenty minutes. The controlling husband? I forgot he existed. I forgot the cage. I forgot the rules.

Then, Ted and Carl walked out. I stepped forward, my voice trembling but clear, telling Ted how much his music had carried me through the years, concluding that I just wanted to shake his hand. He smiled, a warmth that filled the sterile hallway. "No handshake," he said. "A hug."

And then I was enveloped in one of Ted’s famous, soul-healing hugs.

It was at that exact moment that my husband—having scoured the parking lot, the lobby, and the auditorium—finally burst through the stage door. Did I freeze? Did I apologize? No. The meek, controlled woman was dead. I turned to him, shoved the camera into his hands, and commanded: "Pictures. Take pictures. NOW!" And he did.

We split up not long after that night. Not because of Ted, but because the illusion of his control had been permanently shattered not just from that night but for more serious reasons. I am no longer that submissive woman. I never will be again. Today, I am happily remarried to an incredible man who understands love, trust, and real communication.

But I still look back at that night in Charlotte. It wasn't just the pinnacle of a lifelong dream; it was my own declaration of independence. Standing backstage, wrapped in a stranger's kindness, I finally grew into the woman I was always meant to be.

The decades that followed blurred into a beautiful tapestry of return trips, the initial spark settling into a steady, comforting warmth. I chased the music across the map, Myrtle Beach, Morganton, NC and once traveling up to Rochester, Illinois with a fellow "Ted Head," finding the same gentle soul waiting at the end of the night. 

But the most sacred memory came the year I brought my daughter, Brooke. Ted stood with her, completely present, talking for nearly an hour about her life, her dreams, and sharing stories of his own daughter who was around her same age. 

It is a rare, quiet magic when the giants of our youth remain giant when you stand beside them. After fifty years of fame, draped in the bright lights of a lifetime on stage, he remains entirely untouched by it—a man profoundly gracious, soft-spoken, and infinitely kind.

Charlotte NC 1994

Myrtle Beach my daughter and I with Ted

Ted Neeley Jesus Christ Superstar 1973

Ted and I Rochester, Illinois 2007

My daughter and I with Ted

Touching All The Bases By Tim Peeler

Some memories refuse to stay buried in the dust, remaining long after the final inning has ended. This raw, beautiful piece was captured by Tim Peeler—a quiet testament to the life of my dear friend, Steve Lail. Steve was a true journalist, a teacher extraordinaire, and a soul who looked deeply into the world. Tim’s words hold the heavy, fragile atmosphere of Steve's final days, preserving a spirit that pain could never quite dim.
The Rainbow Kid Remembers Little League

For Journalist and Teacher Extraordinaire Steve Lail

A female friend tells me again
The games, the sports will pass, 

Will never matter five years from now.

I agree, to be nice, But I know
In my testosterone-driven male heart.

It's hard to describe the smell in Steve's room,
The stale beyond stale of bedfast living.
The odor of bags, the sharp sterile smell of medical equipment,
the pain killers sweated out,
of air that simply can't
Move like it should when even the noise
From the hallway hurts.

He angles and re-angles the bed to curtail
The rage of pain that at fifty-two 

Has haunted him for nineteen years.

He runs a shaky yellowed hand 

Through his thick graying beard and manages
From weakness in a sly smile
In a voice that modulates
From weakness to solidity.

He drawls out another story for me, 

This one about a Little League baseball game,
We're talking 1950s, in which his team
Won the championship, and he got 

Several hits, but the clincher, 

The part that fueled his passion, 

That nearly brought tears 

Was that his Dad and his brother 

Could not remember that game.

No matter how much detail he supplied,

Regardless of dates, names,

Or corroborative events.

Blame the pain, 

Blame the morphine 

If you will, but it galled him so much 

That we had to change the subject, 

To talk instead about some of the autographed pictures on the walls:

The cowboys, the pretty Women, the great comics 

Ah, but that game was still on his mind.

Even when I squeezed his soft hand

And left his nursing home room.


Written by Tim Peeler



Tim Peeler is an award-winning poet, narrative writer, and educator rooted in the landscape of North Carolina. A past winner of the Jim Harrison Award for his contributions to sports and baseball literature, he is the author of over a dozen collections of poetry—including Touching All the Bases and West of Mercy. His work frequently explores the intersections of memory, regional history, and the quiet, heavy realities of rural lives. Five of his books reside in the permanent collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, New York. When he isn't writing about the fragile, beautiful moments of human connection, he serves as an educator in Hickory, North Carolina.

The Night Stand- written by Stormy 1997

The Rainbow Kid

Doesn't know he is dead

Yet he writes no more poetry

But death

Not melancholy

Dragged him away

But he still sits beside my bed

Whispers in my ear....

Of the Old South, and old dogs

Sports jackets, his Mama

The silver thimble and the Medicine jar.

All night he begs me

To read aloud.

Dedicated to Steve Lail

1944-1998

Who was the Rainbow Kid? Go here to read more: Steve Lail -aka- The Rainbow Kid