As a new writer, I quickly found homes for my articles and short stories in:
The American Mix, the Guiness Newsletter and web site
Escape Artist.com
Happy
Kalliope
Collected Stories.com
Prior to seeking publication, I took writing classes at the University of Colorado where I studied under Bruce March George Moore and Naomi Rachel.
I am an active member of The Internet Writer’s Workshop.
I remember the first time reality squelched a dream. I was perched on the back stoop of our ranch house with my dad. Our diminutive yard bordered a dusty alley alongside five pairs of railroad tracks. Across them were the backsides of ragged shops lining “uptown” Franklin Park, Illinois. Cicadas chanted in the stifling heat and a thunderhead bloomed over the cottonwood in the corner of our yard. A lowering sun tinted the cumulonimbus gold.
“Look, Daddy,” I said pointing to the south. “That cloud looks like a castle. I want to fly there and live in it like a princess.”
He dragged on his unfiltered Camel, looked up and shook his head. “No, Pookie, you wouldn’t. Even a twin engine prop would have its wings torn off if it got anywhere near that cloud.”
I flinched with this new knowledge. There was danger in something so beautiful. Danger when storms blew through and bent our Lombardy poplars to the ground like a row of peasants bowing before royalty. If there was danger in the things I couldn’t control, then what was the point of dreaming?
And so, I tried to make safe choices. I fell in love, married, then fell out of love and divorced. I stumbled into a job in the computer software industry in its infancy and went from punched cards, to disks the size of Frisbees, floppy drives, hard drives, and finally to the Internet.
Dreams? Well, they were for hobbies, for night classes, for vacations. The rest was reality, what I expected from life and what society expected from me.
Then I met Paul. Tentatively at first, I began to let go of notions.
“Where would you like to live?” he had asked.
I thought the answer was simple. I’d always lived in the Chicago area and, like my family and friends, assumed I would stay there the rest of my life.
He shook his head. “We can live anywhere we want.”
So we began moving further afield each time - Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, then Boulder, Colorado.
“What do you really want to do?” he'd asked.
In 1999 the small software company where we worked was a gobbled up by a larger one. Paul had the choice of being demoted or downsized.
He quit.
He was fifty-six years old, too young to retire and too old to easily get another job. Now what would we do? We took a deep breath, dusted off our bruised egos and began to reinvent ourselves.
We started to dream again, to consider all of life’s possibilities, to form a mental picture of what existence might become if we were willing to take a risk. We began to imagine.
