No Money Changed Hands

Welcome to the Spacey Gracey Review!

After resisting the call to blog for over a year now, I'm giving up and going with it. That long and winding dirt road has led me right to this perfectly bloggable point in time. I just don't want to miss a moment, and neither will you.

Blogging just makes sense now. This might have something to do with the fact that all my regular publishing outlets seem utterly uninterested in my work at the moment, and wouldn't ya know, right at this wildly delightful, clarity-ridden, confusing, momentous, strange, poignant, clamoring, glamorous, silly time in my life when I want to share much, and not let a single honestly precious or bizarre story go by without telling someone all about it.

My favorite stepmother, Sally Dearest, named me "Spacey Gracey" when I was a teen, shortening it to just "Spacey" in a moment of touching intimacy when once demonstrating the numerous domestic arts she flaunted around the charming, suburban home she never could legally wrest from my dad.

We would make Coca-Cola cake in her immaculate kitchen. No men allowed. Sally's glass-shattering admonishments kept them skulking in front of innumerable, unfathomable football games, or alone in their rooms. Only with me did Sally truly calm down.

She would calmly chide me if the flour wasn't leveled to precision in her expensive measuring ware. I relished the attention, and knew I would never fail her. Instead of biting off my self-esteem, Sally's constant reproach only tapped a hidden reserve of pride in what I knew I was capable of delivering, provided someone ever gave a shit.

I COULD level that flour with a deft swoop of the knife. I COULD drive her power-ridden '73 Cougar coupe because she alone had taught me how to manage such a machine. Only I, the eager student, could be trusted to care for the Cougar in the same way she did when she was at the wheel. Because I had learned well from the master, I was given much. Including a too-often dormant belief that I matter to myself, and that I matter to others as well.

I dedicate this blog to Sally Dear. Time in her kitchen, in her exacting world, has led to writing. I can only hope it turns out as well as that remarkable Lady Baltimore cake - the one I made for my dad's birthday last year. Lucky me.