Greetings to everyone on this final Friday of 2007. I am sitting down at the computer today as Eliot takes his nap with nothing to say really, but I am starting to type anyway just to see what might reveal itself. For several weeks now I’ve been thinking I should add a new note here but couldn’t think of anything to write about. I seem to be at a loss for words these days. Recently I have come up with three new pieces of music (one with distinct verse, chorus, and bridge sections for a new song and two others with definite verse and chorus sections) but can find no words to fit them at this point. I am waiting to hear a phrase or notice an image that will inspire me to build a song from there. That’s how songs happen for me a lot of the time. A gift out of nowhere that suddenly presents itself. A few months ago a friend of mine from high school and college died. Her name was Sara. She had just turned 43 years old the month before her death. I have been thinking about how people live on after death through the lives of others that they have known. All my memories of Sara and the things we shared together live on in me. And the same is true for all the others she knew and touched. She lives on through them as well. And she definitely lives on in her two sons, just as my mother and father live on through me even though they are a long time gone now. I find a bit of comfort in knowing that. After I learned of Sara’s death, I dug out an old notebook full of poems and stories I wrote about 20 years ago because I remembered that I had written one about Sara and the long walks we used to take on summer nights back in Tipton. As I read it now, I recognize that it is not a very strong poem in terms of the writing (I do better with songs), but since I have no new words to offer you today, I will leave you with words written long ago. And a bit of Sara will live on as you read them. Love to you all, Lisa WALKING WITH SARA Night after night and summer after summer we’d stroll quiet small town streets and talk of things to come. With mosquitoes at our ankles and June bugs buzzing beneath the corner streetlights we watched the grassy schoolyards, uneven sidewalks, and worn pavement slide like the passage of time beneath our feet. The same expressionless houses, the same faded street signs the same remote buildings passed silent at our sides again and again. The rustle of cottonwoods, the rattle of an occasional car passing the drone of cicadas in dry grass mixed with our voices and floated in the heavy summer air. A thousand dreams were spoken in those closing hours of dusk, the sun sinking below the horizon like all we had hoped for. We’d proclaim to slumbering neighborhoods that we’d be something special someday . . . an executive a decorator a musician . . . or so we’d say as we passed from streetlight to streetlight corner to corner summer to summer. (L. Moritz – circa 1986)