You have improved my life.  It goes beyond the obvious.  The material.  The house we live in.  We both love books and music.  And the house is bursting with them.  We both share a deep love of both.

The web site and blog you had a major hand in formatting.  I never would have started either if it wasn’t for you.  One and one really make three.

I prepare meals for you gratefully.  It is a privilege for me.  The two CD’s of my poetry came about for you encouraged me to recite my poetry in public and praised my delivery.

I never had such a large living room window and we watch the birds come to our feeders.  If you had not loved watching birds as much as me, it never would have come about.

I play my music for you all the time.  I usually play “DJ”.  That is a privilege to share my music.  We grew up in the same time frame and are familiar with quite a bit of the same music.  That is a gift.

You make me laugh and that is also a gift.  I write more funny poems because of your encouragement.

There are so many ways you enrich my life and these are only a few quickly stated ways.

It was in the late sixties I started keeping a journal.  It was a pivotal point in my life.  Forty years ago I knew my emotions were frozen.  I could not cry.  I did not know how I felt at any moment.  I was deeply depressed.

My journal was a start.  It gave me somewhere to go safely.  It was my only outlet (outside of sports) at the time.  My writings back then were not that good.  I poured out my depressed feelings.

Eventually some of my entries became poems and even got published.  That was the furthest thing from my mind when I started.

At some point years later I made an important shift:  instead of accenting the negative I started writing more and more about the positive in my life.

I never would have got there if I had not written first about all the things that were bothering me.

At some point I started recording the humorous things that happened around me.  It became another way to diffuse the “craziness” I saw.

I found out decades later I liked making people laugh at open mikes.  And I wrote more and more funny poems.

None of this would have not (???) happened if I did not start journalling in the late sixties.  Now my blogs have almost replaced my journal.  Though entries in my journal still trickle in.