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Poverty reeked ; was all over the place.Medicaid paid Deanne's medical bills and supplied the drugs that
had kept death at bay 4 years longer than anticipated by experts. Medicaid had stringent rules to qualify in Florida--one's
income had to be from SSI, which was a government program for some disabled people that paid them $545 a month for living
expenses and terminated the month they made a dollar extra. Recipients could own only $1000 in posessions, including
a car, excluding only a house, when Deanne was accepted in 1996. By 2003, the possessions could have a value of $2000. Unfortuately,
there was no $1000 to purchase anything more.
Deanne had to divorce the father of her children, as the head of household had to be on SSI and he was on Social Security
Disability, or SSD. He had a conversion van worth about ten grand, which became his home often over the next 6 years.It would
have been impossible for the family to give up the family van and get a car worth less than $1000--they'd never have the money,
on their income, to fix the things that go wrong with a $1000 car. And Deanne could not die in her two year assumed time frame
leaving her children without transpo. Marina was only 2 and a half years old, Mary, 8. They needed every break they could
get, as they already never had the gas to even spend a day at the beach 25 minutes away.
There was a hole in the middle of the kitchen floor through which you could see sunshine warming the rotted wood beams
under the house.The ceiling in the kitchen was made of two pieces of thin styrofoam and a thin metal strip in the middle--
rains had caved it in at that middle, discoloring it to an ugly blood-and- urine-like stain and dripping so badly
that Deanne and Dan, her husband, had to place deep pans and pots all the way across the kitchen from one end to the other
and rise in the middle of the night and dump them because they overflowed several times a night during Florida's
subtropical summer showers . It also , bad-movie-like, leaked over each of the beds right where the occupants
heads were, although Dan, a stained glass artist, tried to silicone the roof like crazy.
Dan had spent his life making hand-painted Biblical scenes on stained glass, except for 2 years in the Army serving as
a combat engineer and demolition specialist in Vietnam. He and his father had spent his fathers' last years companionably
making windows together six days a week and sailing their 26 foot sailboat every Sunday. Dan had begun working in his dad's
studio at age 11, sweeping floors and then cementing windows. The Myers' got plenty of work although they were too poor to
print a fancy color brochure or send high-pressure salesmen around-- they got 90% of their work through word of
mouth. Together they filled hundreds of Florida churches, chapels, and temples with the elder Myers' stained glass art.
Joe Myers had developed a reputation as an artist , with several public murals (one adorning a Post Office in Lake Worth,
Florida--recent Paalm Beach Post article below) and much admired stained glass original art at two of the once three
local high schools, the Veterans' Hospital, and the fancy Malio's Restaurant in Tampa.
By the mid-1970s Joe's vision was almost completely destroyed from retarded macular degeneration, a condition which limited
his field of vision to the outer edges of the circles of his pupils, with him seeing only a great black spot
in the center . Dan Myers became the studio artist on glass, and it was a big secret, for people were coming for Joe's art.
Joe indeed signed his name to Dan's art to perpetrate the hoax. It did not, after his death, win Dan many commissions, as
everyone believed the great master painter was dead.
At last a Catholic priest deeply in touch with the spirtuality of the Holy Spirit, Christ, and all those called in His
name, possessing such gifts of Life in the Spirit as love, joy, peace, and discernment, gave the wretched-looking, ramshackle
stained glass studio who's owner and his wife had missing and bad teeth very evident even without serving them Communion ,
a chance.
He entrusted with these humble poor folk a $24,000 stained glass window with a 50% deposit down, trusted them not to
be fishing for as many deposits as possible before they went bankrupt and got out of returning work for it. Trusted them not
to go belly up accidently, in spite of their good intentions.
Trusted them.
The results are a magnificant, much lauded window over the altar at Christ the King Catholic Church on S. Dale Mabry
in Tampa, almost immediately upon installation appraised as worth a quarter of a million dollars and insured at such. The
Youth Center made a bundle selling magnets of the window. Vicars, bishops, priests attended its dedication and Fr. Michael
Muhr said over Catholic public radio to 440,000 listeners in the U.S. that the artist, Dan Myers, was one of the most
humble people he'd ever met. .
It was Deanne's window too, but she knew it was important for her husband to be sought for his artistry if he were to
continue to compete with craftsmen with 1/10 his experience and fancy color brochures.
These Days In Stained Glass Industry
These new studios were slick. They didn't mind white lies to churches at all. They left out of their brochures that they'd
been in business 2 years, learned the craft 3 years before that. One studio founded in 1976 was able to say with a straight
face in large colored text in the Yellow Pages, "One of central Florida's oldest studios." Dan's studio was the oldest--founded
in 1946.That there was a 30-year difference the public would never know, for Dan could not afford the yellow pages ads of
his competition. A search through Tampa Yellow Pages from 1946 to 1996 reveals that 99% of the studios operating in one decade
didn't exist by the next. But while they did, they tried out frightful windows with the churches, following the dictates of
the Stained Glass Association of America that pictorial church windows talked down to congregants, were relics of an era when
most people couldn't read, and now people could grasp symbolism so well they did not need the Bible scenes to understand the
"message" of the art.
That pictorial stained glass art was indeed not American; but the European form. The American form used the medium as
the message. And the SGAA existed to promote that. period.
They wined and dined architects and everyone with purse power (Harvard, by way of example) with pretensions that their
association, much like the AIA, weeded the bad studios from the good, offering their member studios and artists as the only
examples of the latter.
It cost hundreds of dollars a year for an individual artist to join, more for a studio, and
they were chosen by the quality of the slides of installations they sent. Dan and his dad before him knew they'd be rejected
summarily for the "insipid" paintings of Jesus ("No one knows what he looked like anyway") on stained glass, perpetuating
a dead style that ruined modern architecture and was strictly a no-no.
So the new breed of architects, post-1975, did not work with the Myers studio, as a rule.They became relics. They had
always worked as a labor of love, since small churches could not afford to pay what it would cost to give a devoted
glass painter more than a modest lifestyle.
Painting on glass with an eye for reality is labor-intensive,. Each piece of glass--perhaps 6,600 of them in a large
window--had to be painted and fired in a kiln, painted again and fired again, up to 7 times per piece to achieve the molding,
shading, etc that made glass look like brick, rock, grass, clouds, a human arm, a robe, tattered rags, a wooden boat, a live
rose.There was no profit--the Myers' made $54,000 a year afte expenses, which went to more than two families, as Dan could
not install church windows alone, and extra labor was hired for each installation or restoration.Their very best year
ever, in the studios' 50-year -old history, was $106,000 after expenses, which the dad did not split with the son, although
he called the son a 50% partner on paper to avoid paying his employee taxes, but paid back himself as loans he'd made to the
company, giving Dan his usual $8 an hour and putting the rest in a money-market account he shared with another son, who got
the money upon his death; it was not available to run the family business with.There was nothing available to run the family
business with, and that Dan and Deanne managed to hang onto it for a decade following the death of the founder is testimony
to their strength, faith, and powers of endurance.
And or stupidity. After serving a year in Vietnam, Dan feared change.Yet he was quoted in a St. Petersburg Times
article in 1994 as saying he promised God while an overseas soldier that he would devote his life to the studio and
stained glass art for the glory of God, if he could return home.
Catastropic Illness Strikes
Dan's emphysema closed his studio down permanently by 1999.Deanne was well on her way to trying to secure a longer life
than the 2 years estimated, herself, by then, and in no condition to help make leaded glass windows.She had an ejection
fraction of 15 to 20%, which was often used as an indicator of when to ready the heart failure patient for heart transplant.
She could not strip the sheets off her queen-sized bed or put them on without getting sick physically from the effort.If she
carried 30 outfits on hangers to closets, she slept the next whole day .
Florida splits up a Family it's so Pro-family,
right
The couple divorced in January 1998 so that Deanne could recieve Medicaid. Although Deanne recieved custody of the children,
she knew how she would despair if the rest of her family left her to go on alone, living alone , so she took one daughter
with her to California to get better medical care while Dan kept the other so that he would not be bereft of all family suddenly.
It was a very hard two years for the seperated sisters, the mother seperated from her 10 year old, the child seperated
from her mother, the other child from her father, and he from her. When Florida began to pay for heart transplants for Medicaid
recipients, Deanne came back, and resumed living with both girls while the lost, foggy father often lived in his van in her
driveway, too depressed to try to find a home .It was hard for the children to see their dad lost like that; hard on mom to
put up with , all of it hard on everyone. Mom began losing respect for her ex-husband and to be rather glad she'd divorced
him. The children felt like they were always going through the divorce, that it had no end, no recovery period. Dad of course
would not allow Mom to date, would not allow his children to be exposed to anyone he didn't know, or ride in the car of any
driver he had not himself ridden with, and all sorts of possessive acts of defiance, fearing that his "property" was
maybe thinking about a better life without him. Deanne could do nothing as his studio, while defunct, bordered her home, and
Dan had a right to be on his property, "protecting it" as a judge ruled, any time he wanted. Dan considered that a judgement
in his favor as to having the right to protect his children from anyone Deanne might want to date. His entire focus became
the fear of his ex-wife falling in love and being taken care of better financially by joining up with a man with an income,
no matter how many times she explained to him that she'd lose her Medicaid straightaway if she did that; and that Medicaid
was her mother and her father, her sister and her uncle and her grandparents all at once: it was her lifeline.
He forgot that he owned land with a value and accused her of going to sell his childhood home right away , live it up
on the profits, then die and leave him and his children homeless.He fought for 3 years to keep her name off the title of the
house she'd recieved in the divorce. Everything could be explained to him clearly, how he owned land valued at more than hers
by the tax collector; how she aimed to get a transplant and live, not die; but he'd forget in hours , his brain destroyed
by a childhood of high lead levels in the dirt he played in , swept into the soil by himself daily to clean the un-air-conditioned
Florida studio next to his home.
A recent spate of movies from Hollywood about men attempting to rescue kidnapped wives or find missing ones or join dead
ones suggests the majority of U.S.
movie goers, or video renters (and Americans rent $49 million in videos a week, and $50 million in DVDs),
thinks it heroic of man to obsess when his family is torn away from him. How about especially when he serves that
country like a fool for 2 years in the jungles of Vietnam and then when his children are still small, his country's leaders
smile on television about how pro-family they are as they hold behind their backs his wife's right to quality medical
treatment and a heart transplant until she leaves him--of course, with his children in tow.
Deanne was finally able to settle into a home where no rent or mortgage was in July 2001.
That was when she discovered that the electric bill for the 900-square-foot shack approached $400 a month of her then
$ 500-a-month income.
Over the following 24 months the quality of life for Deanne and her two daughters went from bad to worse to unbelievable.
Lightning hit a transformer outside , dumping its oil all over the road, splitting her huge oak beside it in two almost
all the way to the ground. it made her 2-year-old built-in oven stop working. It destroyed her electric glasstop stove.Part
of the tree--a thick dead limb the size of an average oak tree--hung precariously over her bedroom and living room, scraping
the tin roof every time a wind blew. Parts of it crashing onto the roof, piercing it, or rolling off and piercing the screened
porch over her washer and dryer. For two years she called every agency of benefit to the poor and disabled she could find
but none had a program in place to remove precarious limbs and none cared to initiate one to save the lives of her and her
children. The limb stays , even now.
There are many holes in her living room ceiling from it's smaller branches dropping. As fast as they can be siliconed,
new leaks form. The ceiling in her youngest daughter's room fell thorough in a big storm and now looks ugly, the colorful
ceiling fan descending from an ugly-colored stained ceiling with chunks missing out of it.
And another summer is now almost upon them, with it's daily afternoon thunderstorms.
A woman lawyer adopted them for Christmas in 2000, and Deanne's only wish on her list was for the limb to be removed.
The lawyer chose to get her "casual" sleek skirts and office-type blouses and fancy low-heeled shoes, none of which
she can wear anywhere, instead. She wonders, today, how the lawyer would react if she knew that limb was still threatening
their lives, still ruining their belongings. But the lady is long gone; a Christmas-that-year-only thing.
Deanne is in this alone.
There was never any money, now, never. Deanne and Dan, who paid rent on an apartment now, were both broke by the second
week of each month.They discovered slowly, the hard way, that any and all dentist appointments for the kids, doctor appointments
for their teen's acne problems, or for Deanne or Dan, scheduled for after the 10th day of any month, ended up canceled, because
they simply could not scrape up enough gas money to get there.
Repairs were not in the picture--to broken windows and torn porch screens, to Deanne's credit report--
In the spring of 2003 the electric company informed Deanne that they had been estimating her bill because of the
family collie, who at twelve years was expiring of old age in the fenced yard and never
got up, never barked at anyone, but was in their minds a vicious dog, and they had now concluded that she had been undercharged
all along and her new bills would be $366 a month until the back payments she'd been underbilled for were made up, in about
a year.
Her electric went off for 2 days while she figured this all out with them. They said her electric was always going to
go off for 2 or 3 days a month because they would not extend her the courtesy of a 2 -day grace period until she got her disability
check because that was a courtesy they only extended to customers of good status and she'd been cut off a lot.
Without a car, money for a cooler or ice, Deanne lost all refigerated and frozen. food every month when the electric
went off. No matter how much she shopped with this in mind, she still lost butter, mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, salad dressing,
and the like monthly, and could not replace but one of those items when her check did come; for one thing, because she always
had to give the electric company an extra $35 for restoring service.
By May 2003 she'd had as much stress as she could take. her 9 -year-old had a tender head and a lot of trouble brushing
and combing tangles out of it. They couldn't afford detangler. She begged daily for a $7 haircut from a kids' chain. Mom couldn't
swing it. The child was going to school hiding her rats in her hair from her mother (her bus picked her up at 6:30 a.m. and
dropped her off at 4 p.m.) and drawing attention of child welfare workers.
Florida jumps to take resultant children away from ill
parents
Mom had accidently befriended a very mentally ill woman who when Mom would not get as close to her as she wanted, got
even by calling child welfare authorities on Deanne weekly, anonymously, saying Deanne did not cook or clean for the kids
and they should be removed from her care.
Fortunately, Deanne was already in a program overseen by that same department created to allow the disabled to function
outside of expensive nursing homes.It provided her with hot meals daily and 4 to 8 hours a week of a homemaker's service.
And the homemeaker didn't just clean. She shopped, she cooked and bagged individual portions and froze the food for the children
and Deanne to warm in the microwave later.
Angry that Deanne seemed to still have her kids in her last year or so of life, which the sick woman had intended to
prevent, the lady made new calls . She reported the stained glass studio to the city as a dangerous collection of trashed
buildings and a nuisance, although it was behind a 6-foot high privacy fence and had all doors locked at all times and no
broken windows to enter it by. The continual visits by investigators were getting Deanne out of bed once a week or more while
she was on a form of chemotherapy and sick as a dog. Which the false friend was well aware of, and that Deanne had actually
put the chemo -like therapy (interferon ) off for a year of fear of her life not being stable enough to stay in bed a year
yet.
Here she was, the last week of school, unable to purchase her daughter's yearbooks, unable to get a daughter a haircut,and
the school was rewarding the high scorers on the Florida FCAT test a free trip to Busch Gardens and asked only that the children
wear sneakers--which Deanne's child did not have, having outgrown them , and which Mom could not provide.Then a man came to
the door saying if she did not let him inspect her entire house right as she was leaving to get a life-or-death abcessed tooth
pulled after a 3-month fight to lower her platelets and the infection enough to do it--the dentist, Medicaid's only oral surgeon
in 100 miles, was a 45-minute drive and if you missed your appointment, charged you $25 and would not see you again til you
paid, and could not see you sooner than 2 weeks away; and the dentist had already told Deanne she had been on antibiotics
way too long and would become immune to them and die of the infection in her face so would not give her anymore antibiotics
if she missed the appointment to pull it--which, as soon as Deanne stopped them for a day, the infection ravaged her, causing
killer pain,and the dentist had said her only recourse would be to get IV antibiotics in a hospital and probably die there--but
the man said, nontheless, after hearing this,
"I have to inspect your whole house right now or you will lose your children I promise you."
Deanne said,"I'm sorry, but they will lose their mother if I do not get to this dentist within an hour and she's an hour
away." And that was the final straw.
Realizing that there were no advocates for the poor in Tampa, just meddlers bent on destroying fragile lives and families
with limited time on earth together, she could not take being at the mercy of the merciful anymore.
There were none.
Any house, even 3 times the size of hers, would have an electric bill only one-fourth of what hers now was going
to be, month after month after month. No one--no agency for the poor, no one at all-cared to help her determine why her bill
was so sky high and how to fix it so the family could exist in a home that required its' entire income for electricity.The
only one there to help Deanne and her daughters was Deanne.Who would never be able to save for the urgent dental work she
needed done right ( abcessed teeth pulled in a timely fashion by a local dentist, crowns of neighboring teeth restored
after extraction, anesthesia since she was too infected to feel a local; false teeth afterwards, etc.) She plain
could not get that tooth pulled now.
So she asked Modest Needs for help--and got no response. There were thousands of requests at the web site for help--Americans
were slipping all over the country. Besides, if someone had sent $700 for her dental through Modest needs or a friend
did out of pity, she would lose her SSI and Medicaid for several months. No, something larger had to be done--something that
allows people to try to earn money for bedsheets and dentures without losing their medical coverage. Thus, this website
was born.
.No transplant center transplants to anyone with bad teeth or gums.The chances are too great the heart will catch the
infection and the patient die.
Although the state of Florida can show on paper how samaritan they are because they pay for heart transplants for the
indigent, they don't cover dental ( they do not give false teeth, they only pull bad ones without anesthesia and without regard
or responsibility for any nearby crowns or bridges that affects, any sharp bony protrusions after the tooth is pulled that
crop up commonly and cut into the cheek; they do not sew up a sinus cavity they find opened when pulling the tooth.) and so
they actually kill most of these people quietly and rather behind the scenes.
May God bless all the people in similar situations throughout the U.S. where on Memorial Day 2003, millions of Americans
visited thousands of stores for bargains on new posessions they were living fine without but needed to lock their money up
in so it is not available for the less fortunate. Way to go, America! And we are all equally complicit, for Memorial Day was Deanne's
eldest child's 15th birthday, and she bought her a cake, ice cream, watermelon, blouse, balloon, candles, and a few books----may
God have mercy on us all.--- Oh, gosh, they even ordered a pizza--how American, how almost normal we are as soon as we can
be! But they needed a break from white rice and peanut butter from the jar--the youngest told welfare workers who called
her out of class in April that her favorite meal was Ramen soup ...(How embaressing; and of course she didn't tell them what
a finicky eater she is!)
The mattresses are older than the kids and stained and fit for lovely stark cepia art about abandoned children, the sheets
that fit over them snugly 10 years ago flipping off the corners constantly from the over-washed, made-to-last -four-years-elastic
having no performance at all, so that the pretty little children are easily photographed asleep with their faces on dirty-looking
matresses where the sheet pulled way in the night.
Deanne doesn't have enough storage. She expects to get these things into a better place so, no, she is not throwing it
out. She's not even 50, she's not going to die here. She can keep her diaries and books boxed for a planned move, or even
her daughter's movie.
Did the one sleeping with Mom want that? Was it "their thing " and "God Blessed?" that as they prepared
to move, mom and daughter shared a room like familys on the move in motels do, families this week on cruise ships do....So
I can't afford to buy a stove and we have to nuke whatever's cold sometimes from a cooler cuz the power's off
we get our stuff cut off a lot-isnt it funny, people who don't care to help out, on the phone, telling them please take
these kids away from that home!
"communists turn their neighbors in " ! rules
like a mom can't buy bedsheets out of money from the sale of the home
without calling it income and giving up all medical
from 3 months to 3 years, depending on whether
she was able to get a good deal for the house
or was ill, and dying , and under the weather.
"I'll tell if your children
dont have sheets and I'll tell if they do , too
and either way it stops your meds or else you loose your kids, you choose."
__Tis true, The lives of us Americans lie in the hands of such as this.
Let the dying mom get her girls new sheets and show them how to pick them , how the threadcount gives you strong or thin
weave that wears out fast .
let the mom bake cookies at last that as they spill in the door from the crunch of the bus they can munch
warm and fragrant
before calling them vagrants
unraised by a mom, let her fix her oven, its you doin them harm
let her buy them clothes
let them see the sea
without taking away her life-saving medicines, gee!
Birth to grave care, for everyone here. When the children get bedsheets we're suposed to cheer , "turn in
mom " has no place here
not bedsheets are we crazy
someone who'd report a mom for buying beds for her kids is not a lady.
|
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Deanne's daughters, May 2003
|
| We are watching this all , aware it is really really wrong! |
Please support our families in the U.S. who are falling apart from catastropic illnesses!
| Myers' window at Christ the King Catholic Church |
|
| window by Dan and Deanne |
|
| H.Lee Moffat Cancer Center, Tampa |
| Dan's abilities are uncanny |
|
| Above, glass looks like leaves. Here, like clouds. |
|
| Example of Joe, the father's, art |
|
| St. Michael's Greek Orthodox Shrine, Tarpon Springs |
| A Joe Myers Jesus Christ |
|
| A Dan Myers Jesus Christ |
|
| Deanne Young's people, clothed by Dan |
|
| Boy, did this family have fun or what?How many husbands clothe their wife's paintings? |
| Mary Myers, 15, draws manga |
|
There were only two paths--the one I was on, with weekly Life in the Spirit lessons on our dock from Jonny Jesus, weekly
prayer-meeting songfests, and monthly big group meetings in Ann Arbor on the U. of M. campus, where I was becoming Holy Spirit
- filled , throwing off the old 14-year-old, putting on the new 16-year-old.
And this other thing, calling to me, nameless,
formless. "Something calls to me..The Moody Blues formed me with."The trees are drawing me near, I've got to find out why..."
it was quiet, no other words, not all those Bible words.
And I ‘d follow, follow, telling myself, it can't be sin,
it's trees, its lakes, whispering to me in the night; "And only she can hear it , so she goes," Skylark tried to tell them
. It wasn't AWAY from God.
Except it was, because I went--away from God.
The sound pounding through the ground making
my thongs tremble was a bass beat coming through the earth and I followed it, in the early night while my parents were settled
comfortably in front of the tv and did not miss me, through our sub , around the shoreline of a big house just leaving one
of our sub's lakes and bordering another lake I'd never seen- -Upper Silver Lake. The beat lead me through woods, up a hill,
to a dirt road filled with homes of happy families like you encounter in a dream--bar-b-qing on grills, kids playing
basketball on wide drives, dogs barking. It came out on Dixie Highway where, some 2 miles down, was my dad's marina on Loon
Lake. Across Dixie was the sound source--a new rock band venue called The Factory Ballroom, modeled after Filmore East and
the Grande Ballroom. Iggy Stooge or someone was inside, and hippies with long hair were swarming all over outside it from
all over Michigan--the one who took me to get a lemonade was from Allen Park, a very far away place .
Like my Life in the
Spirit group, WOG or something of Ann Arbor, there were many young people, beautiful people, pretty girls and smart, gentle
long-haired boys who's soft hair smelled of Prell, at hippie gatherings, and they loved to sing and play guitars too.
It was like the same thing, they even had God in some of their songs, like KumBaya and later, in San Antonio , Florida,
Knockin' On Heaven's Door being sung by a beautiful gentle young long-hair who, we learned a few days later, died that night
later in a car accident. He'd been the main guitar picker in the circle at Helene's house, singing song after song we all
joined in on, including Bill Mason, now battling leukemia courageously. Helene went on to have a daughter who is a famous
singer and several yeas ago was in a spot of spotlight as the ex of a murdered rapper.*
But that evening, we were just
"Blowing in the Wind". Life was ahead of us and if it was a day long a day was long.
Now I am old--a year from 50--and
no one plays guitar. Oh everyone picks up the one I have-- notable pedal-steel wiz Jack Dickson's first guitar, a three-qusrter
size Suzuki--and goes for it-- today a realtor played Conquistador— but I've no guitar group . Those friends, the ones
from the Jesus group, I have not heard of in 33 years, except Annie,w ho lives a quiet life counseling people on living quiet
lifes, and gardens, in Lapeer, Michigan, where nobody lives.
She's not sure about God. She and my twin are studying Edgar
Cayce religiously.
From the culture of my second half of my teens, I know how two turned out. At 18 I fell in with
a musician crowd because of my love of gatherings where people sang and some people played instruments and these
people lived and breathed this type of life. There were many jams, parties, parties they were payed to play , lots of outdoor
jamfests, lots of music. I had come down from Detroit, Pontiac, Michigan and had a fav list with Herbie Hancock's
"Fat Mama" and "Have a Good Time Cuz it's Alright" and people were like what?I listened to country stations with them, and
for a time, there were my favoriets. Now I'm so old, they are diverse City. The only thing I could never get into is opera.But
rock operas are cool.
There weren't drugs--these were serious young college grads with a huge local following. And we're
talking 5, 6 bands , all friends. One is now in his 20th year as guitarist for a very famous 4- member band who most know
only by its front man. My friend's the quiet, non-assuming type. He also does the music for tv shows, commercials like Nike
and Nascar, Disney shows like Totally Hoops. And has it made in the Hawaiian leis with his Hawaiian slat key guitar playing--
an actual permanent home in a Hawaiian botonical garden with waterfalls in return for playing .
Another is a doctor;
another is a middle-school P.E. assistant coach; another buys design lines for Nordoffs. Another has been in a nursing home
for 30 years telling all the others about the CIA plots against her that got her there.
Another owns a bar and restaurant
.Three are a semi-famous sister trio with a markable song about Christmas in poverty. Another , a house painter by trade,
plays brilliant jazz drums at class A restaurants and made a Christian themed CD.. Another is a scientist working for the
University of Florida. Another is writing fiction about kidnappings and drugs and mobs in Tampa tempered with Christian themes..Another
is mysterious in Montana.One you can't define by her day job, but neither can you any of the others, all of whom are also
musicians, playing in a regular band or recording their own CDs, is a rock-climber, a devoted one out west.One played pedal
steel on David Letterman and now lives with his attornety wife in the Bahanas. Two were characaturized on the Simpsons .two
have recording studios.One has 6 cats and needs a heart transplant.
That's how it went. Few of us had children. Me, Kev, Steve, and Vandelaagemaat, is all. And Helene, of course. Irene
had one, Dennis had one twice, perhaps 20 years apart.
I tried to write. There were issues. I came out the other side alright, but time was tight.I was back to the life
of the Sprirt.
Bearing fruit is for you, too.
I'm bearing now, why don't you, too?
All you do is fill with joy
and peace and kindnesses employ
and love and ask the Lord to lead
you where he planned for you to be
and trust you're there, and "
do for these
the poorest as you'd do for Me." And thank Him, easy done, so blessed ! Pressed a second in his breast
now tell the rest
where you were nourished
don't be spare , the Spirit flourish!
God will as God is wont to do
and I will trust that His will has me loved and loving too.
To have devoted my life to the glory of God, and to still be alive long after I was suposed to be here and to hear the
birds sing, see a sunset and new children laughing, people having devotion to simple, peaceful living, my daughter making
wonderful animated gifs, surprizing me with pride, hear from old friends, feel their care tangibly in the air
enveloping me with soul's surchease
and have food in me and feel real peace
and a creative idea and a tablet or computer or someplace to execute it
is just so
rich.I wish everyone a life as blessed as this .
*Full Name: Faith Renee Evans Birth Date: 10 June 1973
Birth Place: Lakeland, Florida, USA Education: High School. Enrolled to Fordham University Sign of the Zodiac: Gemini
Father: Richard Swain (Italian) Mother: Helene Evans (African American) Sons: Christopher, Jr. (son of The Notorious B.I.G,
born 1996). Joshua (son of Todd Russaw, born 1998). Daughter: Chyna (born 1993) Nationality: American Relationships:
Married to The Notorious B.I.G. (4 August 1994 - 9 March 1997) (his death). Married to Todd Russaw (1998 - present);
Other occupations: Singer
(Taken from official site)
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