Hi dad.   Well, it’s been nine years without you in my life.   It’s been “nine nevers”, nine maybes, nine what-ifs, since you left this earth.   I think often, where has the time gone?   Where did it disappear to?   Just like the bible states, “We are like a mist that appears for a little while and gone tomorrow.”   We are but a mist, clinging to the Blueridge Mountains, high amongst the living, then settling in the appointed ravine.   It was your appointed time, August 11 th , 2008, but I still think and talk about you regularly.   It’s funny when I talk to my friends about you and they didn’t know you in your godly glory.   I try to explain details and “memory days” to have them relive those moments with me because, you were such an oracle in my life.   Your oracle nature has now been hidden for nine years.   It’s been washed over by nine rains, colored by nine rainbows, and covered by nine sparkle-light snows. ...

  I am a woman of dreams, hopes, and moonlight wishes.   I think on a fathom by fathom level.   My mere, watching a movie, can change my outlook on life and people.   My thinking goes beyond the Continental Divide.   Sometimes I ponder that I was born in the wrong era.   Oh, yes.   I am an old soul.   Heels I could adorn with fancy hat, a glide of red lipstick and there!   The 1940’s would swish back.   An old soul, that I am…I say, “Yes sir! And thank you, ma’am!”   My heart is like Secretariat’s; big, powerful, and runs the race of life.   I am an old traveling soul.   I must sail away and be exploring bold.   Gypsy bells and cymbals adorn my waist, to the Emerald Isle I must make haste! My heart often settles on the Giant’s Causeway on the shores of Ireland.   My soul oft travels the streets of Dublin.   Music delights in the background, while I sip on some Irish tea at elevenses, as the green ...

Master O’Banion, King of Evangeline   When I was a little girl, I never met my Grandpa, Alfred O’Banion.   He was gone and settled in heaven by the blue, blue river of life way before my time…1974 a year that looms.   I knew I came from a long line of strong, noble-like men.   My dad was the hero in my life, a real-life, big “S” on the chest, Superman.   There were things in the past that made him Redwood bark tough.   His past poured some pints of terror upon toiled land, but there was also a genre of love woven into shadows.   “I still loved my dad.” My dad would often say.   Some peeks of sunshine dabbled the Evangeline Parish grass.   The story about my dad’s childhood has never really been told, only by family members and close friends.   So, I will build up the renowned man from the Oakdale dust…Master O’Banion. When I was a young girl, I heard stories that spun like tractor tires over untillable land.   T...