—YOU TOUCHED DOWN TO BE MINE FOR A LITTLE WHILE

 

 

…How’s your Wednesday starting? 

Something tells me this week is going to be a far better than you think. 

I sure hope so.

 

…Yesterday it was all chalk outside, the air quality index hitting 174, ashy, smoke thick as a cavalry of ghosts. Hard rain is supposedly coming, but I won’t be around to see it. 

 

…What an obnoxious tease. Amazon sent me two separate emails with the Subject reading: ”We found something you might like!” One was for my book, “This is Why I Need You,” and the other for my book, “I’m Not Supposed to be Here and Neither are You.” 

Yes, I do like them both, very much.

Too bad more people didn’t.

 

…My office is looking so good. If you could see it, you’d smile. My photo pushpin board is nearly all black-and-white now. Some incredible pics. Pretty cool, if I do say so myself.

 

…I’m heading to NY on Friday. Yay. I love everything about Manhattan. My one regret (well, I actually have plenty) is not living there for a spell.

I’ll be upstate mostly, but still spending time with one of my very closest friends.

 

…Hopefully the sky will be devoid of ash today. Yesterday it looked like a chalkboard that desperately needed to be scrubbed.

Be safe where you are.

 

…Speaking of ash/Ashe, there’s this, with Diane Keaton, of all people:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBqh2CiDPyM

 

…And a bit more Ashe?:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khPFe2hLnrY

  

…I’ll leave you with this/these…

 

Wynonna Judd, on life and her mother, Naomi Judd

  

Death is so final, and yet the waves come like an ocean tide, and so do my fears.

 

I wrote a song the other day with my husband that said, “I’m somewhere between Hell and Hallelujah.” That says it all, about my current state of mind. 

 

She (my mom) had two wigs on most of the time. Because one isn’t enough when you’re the queen of everything.

 

She was always so sparkly.

 

I asked questions; What was she thinking in her final moments? What drove her to say, “I’m done.” She’s a tough son-of-a-bitch. Yet she was done, and she was in too much pain. I don’t know what to do with that.

 

Even in our dysfunction, we never gave up on each other. There was a way to meet—and it was always music.

 

In my disagreements with Ashley and Mom, I never gave up loving them, because I knew, behind all that, there was someplace to meet and connect upon.

 

I can’t quite wrap my head around it, and I don’t know that I ever will—that she left the way she did. That’s how baffling and cunning mental illness is. You have to make peace with the fact that you don’t know. Sometimes there are no answers.

 

I feel the Lord. I feel joy and I feel sorrow, all at the same time. I feel incredibly angry she left the way she did. 

 

I’ve been doing therapy for 42 years. Like music, you can never be too good at therapy.

 

The very thing I’m teaching is what I want to learn. I want people to know there is hope.