I break in half when I lie.
I blur, shake and cringe: nononono, not again, whydidisaythat?
In the 3rd grade, Mrs. Platner's--Miss Platypus, we called her--asked us each to come to the front of the class and describe our summer vacations. I listened: Chicago, Texas, Boston, Iowa, Denver; one lucky girl: California.
Our family took only two vacations, ever: Little Rock for a day, and Dodge City for an afternoon.
When it ws my turn I walked all the way from my back row seat and said: "We took a trip around the world."
Miss Platypus was agog. Kids laughed. But I had thought this through for a whole 10 minutes already. From the moment it came to me I was committed. Time slowed. I filled my story with the Eiffel Tower, The Tower of London, The Kremlin, The Forbidden City, Hawaiian volcanoes. Everything a voracious, precocious, artistic little reader of Life and Look and Readers Digest and my Nana's hard-bound 'Horizons' magazines could conjure up.
I blew right past the dismay of having nothing real to share that year. I caught another garter snake. And a glimpse of Sally Todd's panties. My dad got wet in the rain, failing to set off $10 worth of illegal fireworks near an overpass on the Fourth, coming home early from the drive-in's cancelled 2nd show.
I sailed right over the pit of terror at telling such a whopper; went right into the pinch-kneed dare I? do I? thrillarama of Yes! and say this, too! and say this!
I opened my mouth and I convinced. They shut up for a few minutes, eyes wide. The bullshit filled the Overland Park Elementary School and stank up the joint for miles around. Miss Platypus gave up on her "Ok, Greg..." and Gregory!" and sat down to listen.
See, I have always had a brain with a projector running on high speed. I can conjure up whole scenes from my life, movies, TV shows, books, stories whispered in the backyard by nasty boys. Family secrets murmured on the front porch by beery uncles and aunts. Firefly gossip.
I blur, shake and cringe: nononono, not again, whydidisaythat?
In the 3rd grade, Mrs. Platner's--Miss Platypus, we called her--asked us each to come to the front of the class and describe our summer vacations. I listened: Chicago, Texas, Boston, Iowa, Denver; one lucky girl: California.
Our family took only two vacations, ever: Little Rock for a day, and Dodge City for an afternoon.
When it ws my turn I walked all the way from my back row seat and said: "We took a trip around the world."
Miss Platypus was agog. Kids laughed. But I had thought this through for a whole 10 minutes already. From the moment it came to me I was committed. Time slowed. I filled my story with the Eiffel Tower, The Tower of London, The Kremlin, The Forbidden City, Hawaiian volcanoes. Everything a voracious, precocious, artistic little reader of Life and Look and Readers Digest and my Nana's hard-bound 'Horizons' magazines could conjure up.
I blew right past the dismay of having nothing real to share that year. I caught another garter snake. And a glimpse of Sally Todd's panties. My dad got wet in the rain, failing to set off $10 worth of illegal fireworks near an overpass on the Fourth, coming home early from the drive-in's cancelled 2nd show.
I sailed right over the pit of terror at telling such a whopper; went right into the pinch-kneed dare I? do I? thrillarama of Yes! and say this, too! and say this!
I opened my mouth and I convinced. They shut up for a few minutes, eyes wide. The bullshit filled the Overland Park Elementary School and stank up the joint for miles around. Miss Platypus gave up on her "Ok, Greg..." and Gregory!" and sat down to listen.
See, I have always had a brain with a projector running on high speed. I can conjure up whole scenes from my life, movies, TV shows, books, stories whispered in the backyard by nasty boys. Family secrets murmured on the front porch by beery uncles and aunts. Firefly gossip.
And then there's all I invented between 8 PM and 2 AM, every night, in the bottom bunk bed.
My brain sizzled and misfired with holy kerosene in the class that day. Rapid-fire details as if we were all right there, boarding the planes, staring down the Mona Lisa, bonging along with Big Ben.
I slayed 'em.
By the time I crossed the Pacific to Hawaii it caught up with me. I was running out of breath but not details. Hyper-ventilating woke some biological conscience, or maybe it was just a sense of proportion, or childish dignity. I came to. The September heat grew in the Kansas classroom. Crowned all around the blackboards, strips of perfect penmanship, letters in cursive aligned on straight and dotted lines. My stupefied classmates.
Fear. What I had just done.
My brain sizzled and misfired with holy kerosene in the class that day. Rapid-fire details as if we were all right there, boarding the planes, staring down the Mona Lisa, bonging along with Big Ben.
I slayed 'em.
By the time I crossed the Pacific to Hawaii it caught up with me. I was running out of breath but not details. Hyper-ventilating woke some biological conscience, or maybe it was just a sense of proportion, or childish dignity. I came to. The September heat grew in the Kansas classroom. Crowned all around the blackboards, strips of perfect penmanship, letters in cursive aligned on straight and dotted lines. My stupefied classmates.
Fear. What I had just done.
WegotontheplaneinhonoluluandflewbacktoTopekathen, then, thendrovetherestofthewayhometheend. I went back to my seat.
Miss Platypus said: "Well," and told the class to quiet down.
That was my start as a writer.
I stared at my desktop, the inked grooves and initials. At reality. I spent that entire year quiet. I worked ahead in all the textbooks, so I would never be wrong, or called out, or noticed. I made no friends. I ran out of things to do. I would go sharpen my pencil at the far end, taking the long, back-of-the-room path, and slip a book or two from the reading shelf along the window under my arm. Read it behind my notebook.
Miss Platypus said: "Well," and told the class to quiet down.
That was my start as a writer.
I stared at my desktop, the inked grooves and initials. At reality. I spent that entire year quiet. I worked ahead in all the textbooks, so I would never be wrong, or called out, or noticed. I made no friends. I ran out of things to do. I would go sharpen my pencil at the far end, taking the long, back-of-the-room path, and slip a book or two from the reading shelf along the window under my arm. Read it behind my notebook.
Everyone ignored me.
She caught on after Christmas. I sat by the fence at recess, alone, and she walked over, blew the whistle to go inside. In the sudden hubbub she said to me something like: Mr. Greg, if you want to read just take the books. Don't hide them anymore.
I did not look up. I did not say a word. I always read, endlessly, but it took me 40 years to reclaim my writing.
I didn't exactly stop. I took a class in college. I worked in advertising and marketing in the city and then upstate, for 25 years. I ran my business, so I wrote proposals, business plans, specs, documentation, how-tos, manuals. I wrote every day. Data architecture schemas. Project descriptions. I still do.
Once in a while I would jot down a short story outline, a character idea, a cartoon caption, a bit of dialog. The goddamn thing is, I knew I was good.
I was just afraid to lie. To be carried away. Afraid of art, and my wicked powers of deception. When Miss Platypus told my mother she told my father who strapped me with a belt.
Then at 21 I was alone with a baby daughter to raise. I had to be sober and clear-headed. Lucid, true in thought and deed.
I am two, constant reader, I have always been two, a hybrid, awkward animal: the observant, careful, honorable boy, who tests well -- and the peerless artist of rank and foul and hilarious fabulism.
I tell it true here: I love to invent. To lie. That broken other half is certainly me, but I shut it the fuck up, did my job, set a good example. I surrendered for my helpless, lovely infant child all my gift of illusion, toward myself and all others. All my shrewd crafty.
I put on 7-league boots, weighed down my wild arms with heavy-guage chain. Two more came along and I kept my motion reliable and slow and steady. I cradled daughters, not dreams.
I stopped pretending.
My three fine children are near grown now, and all are fine artists. Didn't plan that. Like me, they just are. Blarney not a trauma for them, for there was no belt. I gave my all to them.
But eight years ago I picked up a pen and wrote some plays. Just like that. I saw two produced, one off -Broadway. I got to work with actors, pretenders, and I tell you truer than true: no sad boy from Dickens ever had such denouement. I am man and boy, at last, I am upright. I am inventor of word worlds now.
My brain is habanero champagne, my fingers are barbed wire, my skin is blue flame. I am alpha and omega, lurid life in flight and lyric death with a turbine on its back; I am creator and destroyer of worlds. Paper is my real estate; I own language itself. I declare my power estambic and soaracious and delican, and all is so by virtue of my shameless lies.
"She walks to the door and drops the 30.06. She leaves the rifle behind, and the spilled milk, too, souring on the scarred yellow linoleum."
"The boy folds the dingy towel until it fits snug into the shoebox, presses it over the snapper. He lowers it in, and is OK until he drizzles the first handfull of dirt. He pulls his favorite plastic soldier from the tight dungarees watch pocket, the green bazooka guy, and adds him to the folded towel. The he fills it all in."
"Every time I sat on the fire escape I wanted to talk to someone. Molly was asleep inside, my evening work done, so I sat alone out there, catching a breeze from the Hudson two blocks over. Yuppies and whores and transvestites paced Horatio Street four floors below.
Once I was so lonely I spit on a party of people my age walking underneath, then shrank into the shadows, a coward. Most nights I just watched and listened: the rude, druggy laughs, the fights, the giggles and whispers of lovers under the brownstone stairs.
The noise of 14th street was revving, the rim-rack-thumpthump of radios, the cabbie horns, all rising in the golden streetlight glow over the roofs across the street.
Jazz, it was, knackled by men in heels and the tympanis of slammed doors and bottles thrown. I would fall asleep and wake as dawn slipped over Williamsburg and down the canyon from the loisaida. Stiff, drool in the corner of my mouth, and iron bar works etched deep in my face and bare arm, I would go in and get out cereal, and dress Molly for school."
I can write anything.
Yet still I toil. My workboots and chains are my fixed wardrobe. I am so deep inside the lie of wife and life and children and sacrifice and obligation, I am constrained, bound, wired shut; my control panel framed by latissimus dorsi, unreachable by me no matter how I strain. My goodness and diligence are automated now.
So at last it is safe to pretend, and so I can write, spin yarns, weave tales. And the gift given to me by decades of give in, give it up, give it all away? is this:
I write the truth now. I don't give a fuck if blessed Mrs. Platner said exactly those words, or if it was the Colosseum, not the Eiffel.
I remember now what I had, that day in the third grade. I am art itself, never blocked; I am the marble and the Pieta inside, both. There is not enough time left to write all I have to say, because I have to say Everything. I am unstoppable. I meet my obligations, I surely do, but then I write.
Like now: I am still awake from 8 PM to 2 AM, but now, here, I have a purple pen.
THERE I am still reliable. I give them space and wait for them to come around. I await the small and vital changes that will save their trembling souls. For years I wait, for changes only my restraint and embrace and slyest of words can ensure, and I let them think they did it all.
But here in my lines I am gorgeously, rapturously unreliable. Broken, a wholly and holy broken vessel.
She caught on after Christmas. I sat by the fence at recess, alone, and she walked over, blew the whistle to go inside. In the sudden hubbub she said to me something like: Mr. Greg, if you want to read just take the books. Don't hide them anymore.
I did not look up. I did not say a word. I always read, endlessly, but it took me 40 years to reclaim my writing.
I didn't exactly stop. I took a class in college. I worked in advertising and marketing in the city and then upstate, for 25 years. I ran my business, so I wrote proposals, business plans, specs, documentation, how-tos, manuals. I wrote every day. Data architecture schemas. Project descriptions. I still do.
Once in a while I would jot down a short story outline, a character idea, a cartoon caption, a bit of dialog. The goddamn thing is, I knew I was good.
I was just afraid to lie. To be carried away. Afraid of art, and my wicked powers of deception. When Miss Platypus told my mother she told my father who strapped me with a belt.
Then at 21 I was alone with a baby daughter to raise. I had to be sober and clear-headed. Lucid, true in thought and deed.
I am two, constant reader, I have always been two, a hybrid, awkward animal: the observant, careful, honorable boy, who tests well -- and the peerless artist of rank and foul and hilarious fabulism.
I tell it true here: I love to invent. To lie. That broken other half is certainly me, but I shut it the fuck up, did my job, set a good example. I surrendered for my helpless, lovely infant child all my gift of illusion, toward myself and all others. All my shrewd crafty.
I put on 7-league boots, weighed down my wild arms with heavy-guage chain. Two more came along and I kept my motion reliable and slow and steady. I cradled daughters, not dreams.
I stopped pretending.
My three fine children are near grown now, and all are fine artists. Didn't plan that. Like me, they just are. Blarney not a trauma for them, for there was no belt. I gave my all to them.
But eight years ago I picked up a pen and wrote some plays. Just like that. I saw two produced, one off -Broadway. I got to work with actors, pretenders, and I tell you truer than true: no sad boy from Dickens ever had such denouement. I am man and boy, at last, I am upright. I am inventor of word worlds now.
My brain is habanero champagne, my fingers are barbed wire, my skin is blue flame. I am alpha and omega, lurid life in flight and lyric death with a turbine on its back; I am creator and destroyer of worlds. Paper is my real estate; I own language itself. I declare my power estambic and soaracious and delican, and all is so by virtue of my shameless lies.
"She walks to the door and drops the 30.06. She leaves the rifle behind, and the spilled milk, too, souring on the scarred yellow linoleum."
"The boy folds the dingy towel until it fits snug into the shoebox, presses it over the snapper. He lowers it in, and is OK until he drizzles the first handfull of dirt. He pulls his favorite plastic soldier from the tight dungarees watch pocket, the green bazooka guy, and adds him to the folded towel. The he fills it all in."
"Every time I sat on the fire escape I wanted to talk to someone. Molly was asleep inside, my evening work done, so I sat alone out there, catching a breeze from the Hudson two blocks over. Yuppies and whores and transvestites paced Horatio Street four floors below.
Once I was so lonely I spit on a party of people my age walking underneath, then shrank into the shadows, a coward. Most nights I just watched and listened: the rude, druggy laughs, the fights, the giggles and whispers of lovers under the brownstone stairs.
The noise of 14th street was revving, the rim-rack-thumpthump of radios, the cabbie horns, all rising in the golden streetlight glow over the roofs across the street.
Jazz, it was, knackled by men in heels and the tympanis of slammed doors and bottles thrown. I would fall asleep and wake as dawn slipped over Williamsburg and down the canyon from the loisaida. Stiff, drool in the corner of my mouth, and iron bar works etched deep in my face and bare arm, I would go in and get out cereal, and dress Molly for school."
I can write anything.
Yet still I toil. My workboots and chains are my fixed wardrobe. I am so deep inside the lie of wife and life and children and sacrifice and obligation, I am constrained, bound, wired shut; my control panel framed by latissimus dorsi, unreachable by me no matter how I strain. My goodness and diligence are automated now.
So at last it is safe to pretend, and so I can write, spin yarns, weave tales. And the gift given to me by decades of give in, give it up, give it all away? is this:
I write the truth now. I don't give a fuck if blessed Mrs. Platner said exactly those words, or if it was the Colosseum, not the Eiffel.
I remember now what I had, that day in the third grade. I am art itself, never blocked; I am the marble and the Pieta inside, both. There is not enough time left to write all I have to say, because I have to say Everything. I am unstoppable. I meet my obligations, I surely do, but then I write.
Like now: I am still awake from 8 PM to 2 AM, but now, here, I have a purple pen.
THERE I am still reliable. I give them space and wait for them to come around. I await the small and vital changes that will save their trembling souls. For years I wait, for changes only my restraint and embrace and slyest of words can ensure, and I let them think they did it all.
But here in my lines I am gorgeously, rapturously unreliable. Broken, a wholly and holy broken vessel.
And perhaps I love no one. I will run away one fine day, having served my 20 million hours of solitude and service. I will live on branch water and beeswax until the ink pot dries utterly and the last bound bristle falls from the holder.
Fie on all truth and a flummox to all response abilities. I write tra-la with blood and carved reed if I must and live piratical, unwashed, doomed and dishonest. I would rather starve for Art than eat one more goddamn word. They will survive without me!
Perhaps.
Perhaps when they all finish school and and have their weddings I will, I will rise from the weedy recess fence and look everyone in the eye, thrust out my lower teeth and say "Bangkok, too!" and resume my world tour, barefoot, bare-armed. I will embrace sacred subterfuge and be whole at last.
Fie on all truth and a flummox to all response abilities. I write tra-la with blood and carved reed if I must and live piratical, unwashed, doomed and dishonest. I would rather starve for Art than eat one more goddamn word. They will survive without me!
Perhaps.
Perhaps when they all finish school and and have their weddings I will, I will rise from the weedy recess fence and look everyone in the eye, thrust out my lower teeth and say "Bangkok, too!" and resume my world tour, barefoot, bare-armed. I will embrace sacred subterfuge and be whole at last.
Bald-faced and old, the truth lies, but it will not lie within me any longer. I will liberate it, die trying, or be damned.
|~
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Seer
daisyjane
The Good Daughter
Chicken Mãâàn
the traveler
Ashley F. Miller
Salon.com
Comments
You have a gift. Go for it!
My kids are in an international school and the vacations are out of this world. You can eavesdrop of conversations of which of the 5* hotels in Dubai or Antalya is the best, whether snorkeling in the Red Sea is better at Eilat, Israel; Aqaba, Jordan; or Sharm-El-Sheik, Egyt. The school debate team's interschool competition was in Belgrade, the Model UN competed in Helsinki. Basketball was in Warsaw.
I've given my kids the world I longed for and their dream is to live in quiet suburbia in the US. Down the street from Grandma and Grandpa, my daughter suggested.
My son's willing to move to Wyoming, as my fantasy is they call it a traffic jam when two cars are in the same street at the same time. In Moscow, normal traffic is half an hour to go 5 miles, a traffic jam means it can takes over an hour. And a real nightmare is sitting in exhaust fumes for 3 hours, not moving an inch.
I love that as a child you made up a summer vacation, the whole world, the better world, pulling in the audience & owning them for awhile. It is the most amazing feeling, like being possessed in a wild & slightly scary way, like discovering you own a power, that you can take your routine Clark Kent & turn him into Superman.
I won't quote every gorgeous quotable line in this piece because my comment would pretty much quote the entire post. I love the rhythm of the words, I even love the tag, having said to myself the same things so many times.
Greg -- continue on the World Tour & write write write so we can read read read!
I am grateful that you have reclaimed what was rightly yours and that I am able to read your words here.
If we had a quotation-from-"the truth lies"-party, we could go all night.
"Bangkok, too!" and
"The bullshit filled the Overland Park Elementary School and stank up the joint for miles around. "
What a perfect way to start the morning, thanks, man!
I love the way you do it...
Sorry, your overwhelming brilliance made me a little daft there for a moment. I'm better now. OK, fourth paragraph...
Jesus, man, what the hell are you doing wasting your time with us? We're blessed that you are, but we'll bear the guilt, forever, when Bendan Bendan sells your stuff to the Koreans. I refuse to weep. Wouldn't be able to stop... (rated with fury)
I love OS. I love writers. You all get it. (stopping short of a Sally Fields moment here)
Ahem. The post contains three small lies. Ha! So there!
As most of you know I delight in answering all comments. I am in harness today, working against a deadline, so I must wait til much later. Ironic, that. But great love to you all and i will return at end of day with bells on, to respond these wonderful comments.
My third grade story: The teacher told us to write a poem and bring it in next day. Not many did it--I think I was probably the only boy who did. She got made and told everyone to write a poem and bring it in the next day--even those who had already written one. So I copied the "Who can see the wind?" poem out of a child's collection of poetry. I think she was suspicious.
Very Whitmanesque post.
r
(And I had forgotten about those Horizon books!)
And of course now I have Got to figure out the three small lies.
congratulations on the cover and to those who have discovered you as they couldn't find a better model for their own work if one day they decide to let themselves be seen.
I hope he turned out to be the genius you are.
Lezlie
Highly rated.
R
I am trying, really hard, to breathe.
This is I-have-to-scream-because-if-I-don't-I'm-going-to-die-Brilliant!
Seer: I can't allow myself to imagine such things. And yes: here I am. thank you
Steve: thank you for encouraging me.
Cindy: wow. that's a cool comment! thank you
...next: correct. I mean write. I mean right. ( thank you)
trilogy: ...which is of course better than the alternative. thank you
Dr. : thank you for your kindness.
Malusinka: what a lovely world some of our children live in. I am so glad yours have such experiences. And of COURSE they want Other. thank you
mLee: thank you
suzie: I was angry and sad when I wrote this. It is how I grapple sometimes. grapple: much better than cope, sometimes. A lifetime of shame, after, but last night I remembered the high flight it was. You honor me with this close read and kind words. thank you!
xenon: sapphire, so good. ba-dum tsh. thank you.
Penrose: I considered pox, but no: flummox is all we can really do: we must adhere, at the end of the day. But perhaps we can divert it from time to time, and pretend we are anarchists. thank you
AtHome: such a fine comment. and see above: yep. Toss out the clocks. Roll over on the beach in the deepest starry dark and say to our chums: let's go fishin! thank you
WomanBlogging: how swell.
And it was different time. At least she let me read. thank you.
anna: as am I, and for this glorious community of writers with whom I commune. thank you.
dianaani: o what a great response. what writer would not love a party for a post?
thank you!
scupper: You remind me we are kindred here, we are similar, and in ways that make us tender to each other. thank you
odette: whoa. sublime. thank you
Lord yes. Yes they are.
akopsa: thank you
Lea! hello, fellow flame! (wait: this is the internet. Flame is that other thing) OK: friendly fire! (o geez). I am too tired for wit. thank, my good friend. I look forward to reading your post about Nathan, tho I know it will break my heart.
Bellweather: you are like one of the old OS gang now! thank you
Amanda! yes, that one I like too. thank you
Elisa: thank you
ClarkK: ha! you actually made me go check sent. 2, you fox.
Wasting my time? I mainline on support and writerly attention, just like all of you. And like most of you I have this income thing to preserve. It would take a book advance to free me from my work. Alas, and a lack.
But this place is forever to me. It's the keys to the good car. thank you
Gary: the joy of my life, to find I am a writer. thank you
Bonnie: he he. Yeah, cracked me up too, when that popped up.
ignite the passport?!? love that! thank you
greenheron: all true. as it were. thank you
Con: OP ended at my street back then; now it stretches to Olathe.
My only act of plagiarism was the year before, some damn thing about a robin. You and I are stone thieves. But we got over it.
Whitman? I am effusive and full of life's delights and i rein in reluctantly. So, OK. thank you
susan: thank you
Dorinda! I remember a motel with a wild west theme, and hills everywhere. And accents. And unhappy black people who looked so much poorer than in Kansas City. In Dodge City I had a Sarsparilla. thank you
Maria: Sometimes crap is good. And I bought vowels with hard currency. (Whatever the hell that means. I need some sleep.) thank you
Owl: I can declare but then I have to go back to work. Sigh. thank you
LuluandPheobe: YES: record what it was spinning. Tho I no longer fear I will forget my masterpiece.
So that was you over there, reading Pippi Longstocking. thank you
Stim: well, you got the allusion. Yep. if only the cosmos would throw down some cash in response. Or a book contract. wait: both! thank you
Roy: roger, Roy. I'm afraid that would be impossible. thank you
Wendy: I don't subscribe to the hooey of post-modernist nail-chewing, and have deep affection and respect for objectivity, rationality, facts, and non-fiction.
We all lie, pose and pretend. It's our nature. Some of us learn to check ourselves. but I no longer hate that boy for his invention. thank you
Lainey: yeah, some issues had lovely pictures. thank you
Sally! "positively human" oh, thou swell.
Ok I will tell you one of them: I do so love my wife and children. Like a brain loves the protection of sutured cranium, like a heart loves the that cage it in, like palms love palms. thank you
Ben: I hope she can make a living. Design still pays. Fine art not so much.
It is compensation. Yes.
and you make a such a fine comment to me here. thank you
Ardee: o gee. thank you!
Nikki: well none of us own nothin, really. It's a figure of speech, i figure. And you say it with concision; anchored with some truth, yes. thank you
Tom: I turned that several ways, and I read your comment as sadness in you, in part, the not settling for either. But you have my part right, about what I prefer, and for me it is bittersweet. I know you to be standup and direct, always. thank you, friend
Joan: sit, please! (but, OK, applaud!) he he. thank you
Lunch: me too. I think it will be about my wife's late uncle. He deserves it. thank you
Roger: well huge? I dunno. but I am in the write place doing the write thing. thank you
Chuck: where have you been? I hear rumors. thank you
Molly my eldest and peg 'o my heart: if it inspires you to write then all good, cause that's the way to be a Writer.
Your comment is worth all else to me, to have your respect. But you and I are just people who fill blank pages. You walk just fine. Your step is sure enough.
Lin: holy smokes. well, ba-jeenius, at best. That boy was lucky to have you for a teacher. thank you
Buffy: write! write about a rock.
Fred Astaire took up painting when his legs gave out. He said he didn't care what they ended up like, he liked the process, the act of creation. He is our Best Model.
You honor me with this comment. thank you
Kim: OK, here it is: I'm still trim, still fit and still have my rigged good looks. Ha! thank you
Natalie: you just broke Lin's exclamation mark record. thank you
Vanessa! that is one of the best comments ever. thank you
Elisa! came back? goodness. thank you
D. Selke: thank you
Denise! ahhh. yer a pal, and a sweetie. xox thank you
hugs: and you came back! thank you
Gorgeous!
You are my hero.
Magnificent, Greg! Inspiring!
I've never seen a river of the mind overflow as yours has here and I should think that when faced with reach or run, one's first impulse might indeed be to grab a pencil and head for ... for ... BANGKOK! Reach AND run my friend. (I told a tale of my 'current events' performance in a post, but didn't see the significance of that little act of rebelliousness until just now - it's significant in that I never forgot that one little lie out of the many I'm sure I told. That one was important. And now I understand why.) You're a marvel Greg.