Our Story Begins:
Make It Happen!
When you get married, you make compromises. Sometimes they are big compromises and sometimes they’re just little ones.
When I got married one of the greatest bones of contention for my wife was the fact that I was a musician. Now, I don’t mean to sound like I was touring with Eric Clapton or hanging out with Keith and Mick on a regular basis, that wasn’t happening. It wasn’t as though the “rock and roll lifestyle” was a problem, either. I played music because music was always a part of my life. No drugs, no groupies. Music was a soundtrack to my life, always was.
Add to that the fact that I was pretty sick as a kid, unable to play as long or as hard as my friends of others in the neighborhood, and music was a world where I could excel, sing, dance, do whatever and it was fun.
Related: Raising Gaybies: Music Soothes the Savage Seven-Year-Old
When I was first married, music paid for groceries. My then-wife Andrea was going to pharmacy school, a move she made quite unexpectedly, and I took, basically, three jobs and gigged whenever I could. There were months we ate because of those gigs.
But my wife felt the gigging took time away from the family. Her, in particular. She didn’t understand, and I get that, but it kind of hurt.
When job opportunities arose that paid better I did have a family to support and I took them as they came. Each move, each career move, put yet another guitar or amplifier in another closet. Eventually, I wasn’t playing at all.
So when my wife passed away in 2011, I had a choice: I could sink into the fog of grief, let it envelop me and take over; or I could – strange as this sounds – take it as an opportunity.
I took the latter.
Head GEM Rene posted a note on Sunday about how she and I connected and began writing here; a post asking if I’d want a crystal ball to know the future. I didn’t. Some of it was selfish: I didn’t want to see my failures. I didn’t want to know if I screwed up, even if I could change it. Most of it, though, was just personality. Most of the joy in my life came from the unexpected and the untested and untried.
But my kids and I ended up okay. If you’d shown me the future: that I was stable, happy, joyous, with another woman! I might have panicked or fought that future. I might have spent all my time wondering about what got me there instead of enjoying how I got there.
After Andrea died I did the unexpected. I literally dug the guitars out of the background and brought them out. I met one of the most amazing group of musicians I had ever known and took a risk to join their ranks.
Then I took it one further. I stopped dreaming about playing and recording music again. At the berating of my daughter I stopped using “single dad” as an excuse and I went into the recording studio. As you read this . . . it’s been two days since my first single, When the Morning Comes was released. It started as a sad song about waiting for that one person to come back and turned into a hopeful song about how you can stop waiting . . . because sometimes the right one just comes in one day. It’s a second chance.
Related: Our Story Begins: When the Morning Comes
Embedded here is the link to the lyric video for my single. If you like it, please share it, purchase a copy on any digital platform. (iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Spotify, you name it!)
I ask you . . . when’s the last time you had a dream or a hobby? When’s the last time you made that happen?
Where You Can Find Me
