"The storm came, wind and rain, lifetimes washed away, but we held on, when all hope was gone because we are here to stay . . ." I'm a California transplant living in Mississippi, a former restaurant owner turned teacher, who is about to open a movie theater. That's the plan. I grew up in one of the most beautiful valleys in the country, Santa Clara Valley, about fifty miles south of San Francisco, a place Jack London once called a paradise. Now most people call it Silicon Valley. I moved out to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, after getting married in June 2005. Though I miss my friends and family, my first glimpse of the "Bay" reminded me of the small town I grew up in; it was love at first sight. Things have changed since Katrina ( a hell of a honeymoon). Going through a natural disaster is a singular experience, one that has the power to shape or change a life. It's not as extreme as surviving a war, but it's close. Still, there's comfort in knowing others share that experience. Bay St. Louis will get better someday. But those of us that were here will never forget those strange days when our lives unraveled. We'll never forget the people from all over the country who gutted our homes, served us meals, and sent us their donations and prayers. You are not forgotton.

Interests:

film, music, football & baseball, writing, hamburgers, peanut butter, singing, hanging on the beach, reading

Music:

Dylan, Jackson Browne, Coltrane, Miles, Joni Mitchell, "Lush Life," Bill Evans, "Kind of Blue," "So," Greg Brown, "Aja," Monk, Brubeck "Time Out," Eva Cassidy "Songbird." Van Morrison, Fred Neil, Cannonball Adderley "Know What I Mean?" Mingus "Ah Um," Kelly Joe Phelps, Coleman Hawkins "The Hawk Flies High," Loudon Wainwright III, Leonard Cohen, Gillian Welch, John Hiatt, Fred Neil

Movies:

Godfather, Witness, Moonstruck, Chinatown, On the Waterfront, To Kill a Mockingbird, Jaws, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Big Bad Love, Blade Runner, American Beauty, Shawshank Redemption, Diner, It Happened One NIght, It's a Wonderful Life

Books:

All the Pretty Horses, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, On the Road, Middlemarch, Bleak House, Blood-Brothers (Richard Price), War and Peace, Sacred Hunger, The Brothers Karamazov, Raymond Carver, Tropic of Cancer, Hemingway, especially short stories, The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, Steinbeck, Revolutionary Road & Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Richard Yates, Slaughterhouse-Five, Forster's Howard's End, The Corrections, The Catcher in the Rye