Writing

 If you have a gift for writing prose or poetry or lyrics it is good to keep writing what you do best at. I started in my teens writing lyrics and poetry. I started to take piano lessons at age 8 like my cousin did before me. He was 5 years ahead of me in school. But, he was always sort of like an older brother to me then as well as now. Only now he is 81 and I'm 76. We used to sail his Columbia 22 Sailboat starting in 1968 when he bought it when he passed the California Bar and started working for Vista which was sort of like the Peace Core in the U.S. in East Los Angeles then. If you did something like this you were exempt from the Draft too. This taught him to be an immigration lawyer then starting in 1968. In 1968 I was 20 years old and my cousin was 25 or 26 and  new lawyer.

So, we sailed on weekends sometimes from Marina Del Rey where his boat was moored up to places like Malibu or over to Catalina Island. His Sailboat slept about 6 people I think comfortably also, sort of like a camper on the water. It also had a john and sink and water tank and gasoline stove and things like this an cupboards for food and a refrigerator but I think it might have been either an ice box or a propane refrigerator then. It's a long time ago now.

One time we put into King Harbor because we had too much sail up and needed a protected place to take down the jenny and put up a smaller sail called a jib. There is also a larger said when you are sailing down wind when the wind is not too strong which is called a Spinnaker too. But, while we were bringing down the jenny and replacing it with a jib a drunk captain of a trimaran ran us over with one of his outside hulls. This threw me off the boat and into the water because I didn't see it coming into us. I was too busy changing the sails at the time so when it hit us I was in the water before I knew it. Luckily I wasn't injured in this boat accident. My cousin was very angry at the drunk captain because this was his new boat he just bought. Also, the drunk Trimaran captain was a lawyer too but they promised to pay for any damage. In the mean time we patched temporarily the hole in the boat which was above the water line luckily with a plastic bag and duck tape so the water couldn't come in and swamp us or sink us. We made it back up north to Marina Del Rey harbor and mooring okay that day and the drunk captain paid to fix my cousin's boat so it all worked out in the end.