I have been writing since I was twelve, poems in a little notebook with a unicorn on the cover. I also wrote in notebooks, tracking Casey Kasem’s top 40 with great responsibility each Sunday. Nothing could tear me away from notating the popularity of songs from one to forty like a musical scientist, charting what hits dropped from number four to number ten. I had a small transistor radio perched against my pillow on my bed, and the sun of Sunday would beam through the window of my bedroom. An age way way before Google, you couldn’t look up a song’s rise and fall on line. You had to be the Billboard chart and I took this task very seriously. I felt connected to the words, the artists and had a sense of purpose. You could call the Top 40 the church of my childhood.
Last night, I was reminded of the love of those first albums. Songs like “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” “Jukebox Hero,” and “Urgent” on Foreigner’s Four album. I knew every word, every line, of every song, and I swooned and yearned and dreamed. The words were everything to me, the lyrics, and to this day, words still mystify and enthrall me. The key to my heart is within the power of the written word, whether it’s delivered in a song, a letter, a book. A truth for so many of us. We get permission to feel the vast range of our emotions when we are written to, sung to, and given a narration that soothes our busy mind. I don’t want to search for meaning. I want it told to me. The essence of what words can convey to another person is so powerful. Whether it is the chorus of a song you play over and over, the first “I love you,” the biting ending of a conflict or the perfectly crafted sentence in a book that lands in a way that causes you to look up and think, Wow. I didn’t see that coming.
41 years after listening to those albums, reading Donna Summer’s scandalous lyrics from the Hot Stuff double album, I am headed to my first writer’s retreat. A client posed the idea to me last year and I knew with every fiber of my body it was a yes. I had to write in France. It sounds so cliche but I had been seeing signs of Paris for years before I took my daughters in 2021, and when I was there, in the gray skies of November, I knew I would be back to write in the gardens in spring. The Come to Your Senses writer’s retreat then evolved in the planning from a 5 day event in Collioure France to a two week adventure, landing in Barcelona for two days, then a bus to the retreat on the border of Spain, and then a train back to Paris to stay in the Marais in an apartment for four days. The plan is to write and explore every day with no schedule. No trying to fit in writing with the busy drill of life in the U.S. Just flowing. I had to pinch myself. Was I really going to just write for two weeks?
“You need a new lap top,” the lovely man I am dating told me. “You need to be able to just walk into any cafe in Paris, open it up and write.” I wiped away a tear. Why? Because I was short changing myself. I had a crap laptop. Six years old with broken keys, an external keyboard, and a severe overheating problem every time I went on Zoom.
I loved him for pushing me to to honor myself and up level. Why would I go through all this effort to plan a trip for two weeks, away from my kids, away from my business, to write and then bring faulty equipment to support my efforts? Did I think this poorly of my writing purpose? I went into Best Buy the next day and bought a new laptop. Funny that I still haven’t written on it. I am preserving the first words to be created on the plane to Spain. Of course this is simultaneously creating a sense of pending pressure that when I do write it better be amazing, so I am also working to strike that mental state.
So how does this trip affect writing and delivering to you a column in June? I can’t guarantee I can write three times a week. That said, I may be inspired when I land there to share my musings, discoveries or any comedic travel mishaps. (Because inevitably there will be one or two…) On top of the fact that this week, both of my teen daughters are graduating (middle and high school) and I am already engulfed in the planning, dress purchasing, afterparties and still trying to keep a semblance of my independent adult life in tact. Lots of endings and beginnings which is the purist totality of a perfect life.
I may surprise you with a post from France. Keep your eyes out. I may write again before I go, but the key for this post in June is spontaneity. So listen for the ding.
Au Revoir and please, follow your dreams. We are made of them.