Writing

Writing can be healing in one's life. It always has been for me. For me, it has been since I was an only child a way to make some sense of my life. When I grew up in the 1950s there was a saying: "Children should be seen and not heard." And most people lived this saying unless they were wanting to be entertained by children sort of like little Singers and dancers and entertainers.

Even I started to learn to play the piano so by the time I was 9 or 10 years old my parents had me play and sometimes sing along with my mother while I played the piano for them. But, conversations were a whole other thing. So, if something was going on that I didn't really understand I had to sit down and write or doodle to try to make sense of a lot of things I was experiencing as a child. Also, we moved around a lot too relatively speaking. For example, I lived in a Spartan Aluminum Trailer a 29 foot model at first when I was born and then my Dad built an apartment below my Grandfather's garage on his 2  1/2 acres of land in Seattle where he had Apple Trees and Black Cherry trees and he had raspberries and boysenberries too. So, at age 2 or 3 I went outside to pick raspberries which were my favorite and I had to try to pick them without getting stuck on the thorns or "prickles" as I called them then. It was sort of like when you pick roses you have to watch out for the thorns.

So, writing has always been a way to heal myself from all the unknowns I faced as a child. I was always very intelligent like my father who was valedictorian of his Senior High School Class also. So, writing helped manage this intelligence and to focus it in more useful directions than just being scared from what was happening around me in my life growing up. This also led to an interest in learning all sorts of things about people and places and what was going on around me in my life.