Me

Born and raised in a small town in Kansas, I eventually realized my lifelong dream of leaving.  Unfortunately, that was the extent of my dream.   The truth is, dreaming was pretty much all I did for most of those first 18 or-so years and the dreams were colorful and exciting.  I was a photojournalist, a prized writer, an eccentric writing traveler.  I captured and published the Pulitzer photo on every outing.  My family back home missed me and regretted treating me with such indifference.  But I couldn’t go home.  Driven to find and write one story after another - capturing the essence that only I could imagine and communicate – my writing was my life and I could not go home.   They didn’t ‘get’ me there...  and never did.  I was chic, wealthy, hip and oh-so-elusive.  I wore tight, straight-legged Levis and brown, loose knit sweaters.  I traveled with a backpack full of lenses and notepads, hiking through the rough terrain of mountainsides, narrow paths, impossibly dangerous locations and the indigenous tribes, heretofore unfriendly, welcomed me, inviting me in to tell their story as they sensed that only I could.  I was afraid of nothing.  I had a calling.  A story to write.  How to accomplish this dream .. well, it never really occurred to me.   

A short and mostly hilarious stint in college exhausted my limited funds, landed me a lifelong friend - the only one of my dear friends who really gets me - and convinced me even further that I needed to be out of Kansas.  But how? 

  

I joined the Army.  I trained (again, mostly hilarious) as an MP.  At my first duty station, I met and married my first husband and the two of us traveled to my second duty station in Hawaii, where I landed a job at the public affairs office.  I finally had an audience.  I wrote.  I took photos.  I learned how to paste-up a weekly newspaper.  I traveled.  I lived on the beach with my beautiful southern husband.  I got pregnant.  Twice.    My female readers already know the rest of the story. My beautiful husband and two babies and I moved back to Kansas.  Actually, when my tour of duty ended and we studied, debated, mapped out our return to the mainland and we landed on Virginia, Arizona, or Kansas as the possible places we would raise our little family.  I did not know for many years that my beautiful husband pushed the Kansas option – not so that I could be near my family - but because they have a professional football team that he liked.

Three years later and in my early 30’s, I got pregnant again.  My beautiful husband was never much of a wage earner and in fact, never really worked that much at all.  Thankfully, I had landed a job making enough for us to get by without many extras – but, we got by.  I wasn’t’ writing much at that point, except the random angry tangent in some secret diary under the mattress.  This was pre-DSL, pre-MSWORD and Yahoo was still the guy who snatched the newspaper out of my yard every Sunday morning. 

When the third baby was a year old, my beautiful husband died in a car crash.  I set about raising my children on my own, in an old farmhouse in the country.  They are grown up now.  Smart, beautiful and mostly happy.  One of them is the younger version of me.  Driven.  Answering a calling from somewhere in his soul.  It has nothing to do with writing or words but he is searching and traveling.  He lives in Arizona.  Turns out, they have a football team there, too.  He looks just like his beautiful dad.  I remarried eventually  and now have a rugged and beautiful second husband.  We are old and mostly happy.  He dreams of fishing and farming.  We have some land and a small garden.  We fish (again, hilarious for me), we camp. I write a little.  I still dream.