Realizing that no one knows I am here. Free at last. I stopped writing for two reasons: (1) fear that no one would read what I wrote and (2) afraid to write down what came to me for fear someone would read it.

My first censorship happened when I was three or four. I was sitting on the toilet in the little-used second bathroom. My mother was cleaning - we didn't have a maid yet - feeling the euphoria of having had a very satisfactory bowel movement I said, "Momma, sometimes when you're on the toilet, don't you just feel like you can do just about anything?" The look on my mother's face told me that there were some things one did not say and that I had better learn them quickly.
I have experienced the same feeling that I had better not let anyone know what I was thinking many times since then. In college a rhyme/song popped into my head one day and I named it "Delicatessen Man" in honor of some of the raunchier songs of Bessie Smith. With lines like, "he's nothin' but greasy meat, but he's so sweet" and "crumbs of egg-yolk up his nose, peanut butter between his toes" it was clear that this was one of "those things you never tell anyone" and it haunted me for weeks like a hit-and-run accident or some other great and dangerous lie.

At this same time I was taking a 17th century English poets class and which demanded a term paper. I proposed comparing the sonnets of John Donne to classic 12-bar blues stanzas in some arcane way that had occurred to me and once again saw my mother's look on the face of my very very important and crusty professor. I really felt that Donne would have liked my idea. HE had a sense of humor, and the themes of love and loss and death fit the blues to a T. I quit the class and, I realize now, I pretty much quit writing.

There were, in my 20's and 30's many letters in the form of a diary of events that went back and forth between myself and friends at the time. Happily these are mainly destroyed. Then there were dream journals in my 40's and 50's. Ditto.

Now there are photos and a blank putatively limitless slate to write on. What shall I say?