Letters to Mom: music

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Tennessee Waltz

Dear Mom,

One of the best features of the Internet is YouTube, especially since the explosion of videos featuring musical artists. I go on Artist Jags, one night indulging in Ray Charles, another Etta James, another Bonnie Raitt, and John Lee Hooker and Nora Jones and.... There's no way in a lifetime you could see these artists and the many performances they've staged. One of the hallmarks of a wonderful talent is that they are the biggest fans of their peers. To watch B.B.King perform with and appreciate Eric Clapton or Chet Atkins and Doc Watson in a duet, this is heavenly.

If you don't see anything else, watch Bonnie Raitt and Nora Jones singing "Tennessee Waltz". They've taken a standard waltz and made it a serious blues tune-and a woman's wailing, stark-souled blues tune at that. It's as old as life and as new as your first broken heart. They make you feel it just like the first time.

a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzDUi_L6MzA

I feel a Billie Holliday-A-Thon coming on.

I love you,

Lisa

What this blog is about...

Journaling and Reconciliation.

After many years of estrangement from my family, my husband-to-be influenced me to gather up the "ties that bind". The result was healing of old battered emotions and the beginning of the best years of my life. I reconciled with my mother, ran away to Central Texas and married the man of my dreams. I did one rash thing, just the one time and the effects were astonishing.

At first we worked together at starting-salary, physically demanding jobs until it became quite obvious his mother, having been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, could no longer be at home alone. We became self-employed on a rotating basis, when one works the other is always at home. His mother's condition has progressed to the point that she is in the Hospice program, and our plan is to keep her at home for the rest of her life.

I began a journal in May of 2006, writing several times a week, printing the results and sending them off to my mother, who didn't have a computer. Knowing I had promised to get the letters out motivated me to make those entries in my journal.

Sometimes a week passes, or a month or a year and you tend to wonder "What happened? How did that much time slip away? What was I doing?". Reading entries in my Journal, now I know.

I was busy.

Letters to Mom

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Tennessee Waltz

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